As I understand the problem, no browser is immune as it is a site server problem.
From the Boss Geek:
As I had mentioned previously we were able to set up monitoring from various areas around the globe and across each unit of a page download.
We've been tracking it all week and it's been very insightful. Though at times the site does hum along, there are also clearly times where it is dragging its tail, especially in Europe (especially in France!).
The primary culprit is what is known as "first byte download", which could be a number of things. We've been testing a couple of different ideas but have yet to crack it.
Then unfortunately today we got snagged by a completely different problem around connectivity with our firewall (Pprune wasn't alone with this one). Luckily the team dug in and solved this one but it took most of the day.
Tomorrow the team will concentrate once again on the "first byte download" issue which we think is really a combination of multiple issues -- auto redirects, file sizes and compression, apache configuration, persistent connections, location of servers, etc. Each of these potential solutions requires tweaking, testing, tweaking and testing and so the fix is not going to be immediate but we do have a TEAM of people working on this.
We also think that there is some erroneous interaction taking place between the ad system and the vBulletin software that may be the culprit of our notorious timestamp issues, so we're actively exploring solutions for that as well.
Tail Wheel