Taras Glek's blog (http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek) contains a lot more information about link optimizations to improve startup time

Taras Glek's blog (http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek) contains a lot more information about link optimizations to improve startup times of Firefox. One of the reasons why loading libxul is so slow normally is that the chain of constructors called at initialization time is arranged backwards in the library (http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2010/05/27/startup-backward-constructors/ http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2010/05/27/startup-backward-co...) so the OS (which is usually optimized for forward loading) cannot efficiently prefetch the pages. There is also a post that explains how they measure the startup time on Windows (http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2010/10/04/diagnosing-slow-startup/ http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2010/10/04/diagnosing-slow-sta...) and Unix (http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2011/01/14/builtin-startup-measurement/ http://blog.mozilla.com/tglek/2011/01/14/builtin-startup-mea...).