> It does? Something measurable or only your personal "experience"?

Just subjectively, with "-O2" I can open up near to twice as many
tabs/windows to witness the same degree of unresponsiveness in both
Mozilla and Galeon.

 > Given the notorious incorrectness of gcc compilers it's probably
 > also contributing to mozilla crashing a lot faster, though...

At the time of 0.9.6 I tested a number of optimisation options and
found "-Os" was producing the most stable builds of Mozilla (from
"-O", "-g", "-O2").

These days, Galeon is my browser of choice on a K6II/350, which I find
as responsive and stable as the BSDI binary distribution of Netscape
ever was.

-- 
Chris Baird,, <cjb@brushtail.apana.org.au>