Here I provide a benchmarking test regarding the start-up speed of firefox 3.0.3, Chrome and IE 7.

The test has been done with more than 30 identical tabs for Firefox and Chrome and with one tab for IE (it was actually crashing when storing more than 4-5 tabs.)

I also provide a benchmark with MarineTraffic.

Here is the video:

[flv]https://xylem.aegean.gr/~modestos/mo.blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/benchmark.flv[/flv]

Download high res video.

The test was performed on an Intel Core 2 Quad 9300 2.50 processor with 4Gb RAM.