grahamstewart - 1:15 pm on Mar 17, 2004 (gmt 0)

Yep, I just tried opening an uncached site (bp.com) in Opera and IE. Opera took around 3 seconds, IE took closer to 9. Subsequent pages were typically around 2 or 3 seconds faster.

Opera (and Firefox as well I think) uses HTTP1.1 with persistent connections, chunking and pipelining. IE doesn't.

I guess you may not see the difference if you are using a very powerful kick-a$$ desktop machine with a seriously fast connection, but on my 1Ghz laptop with a 512Kbps ADSL connection there is definitely a marked difference. Even more so if I'm forced to use a 56K dial-up.