"It is widely known that IE starts almost instantly because of of the DLLs it uses have already been preloaded by Windows apps (regular file explorer in particular)."
That's not my experience. It seems to lock the OS as it tries and grab some system-wide resources (DirectX?). The cursor stops moving and mp3s stop playing for a good half minute.
The same happens with Windows Explorer. Even Firefox comes up quicker than Windows Explorer.
Their page, however, along with their benchmarks is very misleading. It is widely known that IE starts almost instantly because of of the DLLs it uses have already been preloaded by Windows apps (regular file explorer in particular).
Also their JavaScript performance of IE7 is also a suspect. In my own use (not scientific in any way) IE7 outperformed FireFox by 30% but I was using alot of regular expressions so it was mostly regex performance rather than pure JS execution speed.