I don't know whether or not its any faster, if you're on a broadband connection on a decent machine, it should be about the same really. But as far as supporting web standards goes, Firefox and Mozilla are far ahead of IE, especially in supporting CSS2 and the coming CSS3. There are a lot of little bugs in IE in it's CSS support that are so aggrivating, so I come up with all sorts of workarounds since the vast majority are using IE, when firefox displays it no prob. It's just a hassle, really.