This was around 2006, which, IIRC, was pretty much at the peak of Firefox's startup bloat issues. I'm also inclined to believe that he was on an older machine,

This was around 2006, which, IIRC, was pretty much at the peak of Firefox's startup bloat issues. I'm also inclined to believe that he was on an older machine, because this would have also been IE6 days, which was definitely much faster to load than anything else(due to MS basically building IE into XP).