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(disclosure: I work for Mozilla)

The 2x improvement is for cold startup on specific configurations, mainly on hard drives with slow seek times. For faster hard drives, the improvement is less, and for SSDs it may be much less.

I should also note this is just one of many startup speed improvements coming in Firefox 4.

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There are lot of user with slow machines in developing nations. They are typically using a pirated copy of windows xp on a slow hardware and since initially microsoft didn't allow upgrade to IE 7 on pirated copies, lot of people moved to firefox. They would certainly enjoy the fast startup time.And considering that lot of such people are there( it was in the news that Ballmer told Hu that 90 percent of China is using pirated windows) it is still a big win for firefox usuability overall.

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