GMail seems pretty fast to me, often faster than Outlook on my desktop which is synced to it.

What browser are you using? That usually is most of the problem. Chrome chews through even the toughest javascript-based apps, including gmail, greader, facebook. It's way faster to load a web page than to open an application on my own machine.

I use Firefox 3.0.5 on Linux.

I have 10,000RPM drives in RAID 0, so my computer is always faster to open a local app than to open a webpage.

When I put ubuntu on my machine at home firefox 3 seemed substantially slower than it did on windows. I'm not sure if FF3 is crappy on iinux or if there was something about my install that was screwed up.

Firefox has some serious issues on Linux. It's admirable that they make a browser for Linux, but they do seem to let a lot more fall through the cracks than on other platforms.

For example, I've seen several websites that crash Linux in Firefox -- not good. The rendering in general is also not as good as win/mac, esp. with respect to transparency.

Strange -- it seems faster in Linux to me than in Windows, though I've never done any formal benchmarks.

Haven't had any crashing problems, either.

You're using a web-based app right now ...