One particularly ridiculous "argument" for browser speed is the silly notion that if a browser loads a page a millisecond faster, that through some set of speculations somehow that makes you have a year of free time. That's utter nonsense since We don't actually get that "extra millisecond" every time; Nobody opens a web page and the moment anything is loaded start working or reading it, it takes a second or so to "adjust" to the layout; identify the content, etc.
If a Program procedure runs a millisecond faster, then that program will have a perceptive gain in "free time" after it's run as opposed to a slower version of the same; but people don't work like that. Time saved in a program loop is time that is then used on the next iteration, and so on. Time saved on a person's actions less then about 5 seconds or so never add up unless done repetively and one after the other. You don't constantly load the same page or different pages over and over; you are trying to get at the content, the content and the reading of said content is your "task" the computers task is to render that content. If the rendering takes a few milliseconds more or less, that doesn't translate into saved time on the part of the user.
I think I repeated myself twice there. That of course extends to other things. After all, with the boot time, if it takes three minutes, it's only three minutes "wasted" if you let it be; after all, you can do any number of other things while it boots in that three minutes. What is so bloody important that you have to sit there and wait for it to boot, and why was it not important enough for you to have prepared and had the machine ready "in time"?
