Firefox 3.5 looks good... IE 8?? Not so much.
 

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=4833&tag=nl.e550

It's still not hitting Google Chrome's speeds, or even Safari 4's... but considering the extras you get by the way of extensions and so forth, it's worth a milisecond here and there.

As for IE8.... do I hear crickets?

downloaded it this morning, happy with it so far

I don't get why speed is always the focus of the browser tests. Like you said, milliseconds don't amount to much, and most of the time, the difference is only applicable on cold starts of the browser.

There are much better ways to rate browsers... like.. FF rocks and IE8 sucks on donkey balls all day, every day, especially when you are doing CSS. Just when we start to pull away from IE6 fixes, we have another batch with IE8.

I had problems with it crashing on load. Found the problem on my machine and fixed it and now it's all good.