My take on all this:
I have always used firefox since primary school. I went out of my way to learn some things I shouldn't know about my school's network to find out what it took to use it there.
In my experience it is THE fastest. I decided to just run some tests and here are my results.
I loaded 5 tabs in each browser. eBay, Microsoft.com, Google Docs, Gmail, and LPF home.
I set them all as homepage tabs, and with nothing else running started them one at a time and timed them.
| Browser | RAM used | Load time |
| IE | 42,430k | 2min 23 sec |
| FireFox | 25,129k | 19 seconds |
| Opera | 33,982k | 41 seconds |
Test bed:
Vista Home Premium SP1 32 bit
2.5GB DDR2 800 5-5-5
E4500 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2ghz @ 2.4ghz 2MB L2 Cache
Gigabyte P35-DS3L board
10,000RPM 80GB WD SATA hard drive
89% RAM free, 94% CPU free @ time of testing
512k down 512k up internet connection
So as we all know. IE sucks. But it seems, at least for me, Firefox is faster than Opera. And with good reason... I have spent some time tweaking my connection settings for multiple server connection threads etc, to get the best performance possible.
One more thing I have to say...
PLEASE DO NOT USE ADBLOCK!
Annoying as they are, allowing ads to be present benefits others without harming you.
Using adblock means advertisers do not get their pageviews, which means they don't pay the advertising hosts, which means that in a case like this forum, using adblock is going to end up hurting c0ld's income and the forum at large!
It also especially hurts small businesses who can barely afford any advertising, which is the backbone of a small business, and perhaps ads not being viewed ends up meaning they can't advertise due to increased cost from the hosts due to less ads getting through.
Ideas?
I got a 9 mbps download speed once 
From a server in another country, and my internet connection ussually sucks big.I didn't really use mozila so I wouldn't know, but IE sucks big big huge b@llz.They've only introduced tabbed browsing in 7.0 while opera and firefox were having it for ages(I think mozila had it even when it was called firebird :-/ )