IE 5, Mozilla & Netscape 6 are all much faster in Classic than they are in OS X. This is due, I guess, to several things:
- OS X's more computationally-intensive display layer
- The fact that neither IE 5, Mozilla, nor Netscape 6 are available in Cocoa versions which do not rely on the slow OS 9 compatibility layer (Carbon).
- Bloat and sloppy programming of OS X software. (If iCab, a Carbonized web browser, can render and scroll pages as fast as an OS 9 web browser, while being 1/2 to 1/8 the byte size of its competition, why can't IE or Mozilla or OmniWeb?)
- The crappy poorly-optimized OS X compiler.
If you really need speed in an OS X web browser, the only thing I've found to come close to any OS 9 browser is iCab. That's probably not an answer you were looking for, but it's the only one I can think of. 🙁
Alex