So I'm guessing you use Opera. That's a good browser too.
The performance tests are skewed because IE components are prefetched while Windows is still loading, so faster startup times and smaller memory footprints are to be expected since they only account for the portions that are loaded once you launch the application through the desktop. I will say that Firefox has gotten a bigger footprint over the last few releases, though. I hope to see some changes with the 2.0 release.