FireFox 4 beta 7 is fast when it uses hardware graphics acceleration.
On my system it detected:
- ATI Radeon HD 5600 Series
- Direct2D enabled: true
- DirectWrite Enabled: true
- GPU Accelerated Windows: 2/2 Direct3D 10.
To find out if it detected yours, put about:support in the address bar and go to bottom of resulting page. This blog post has more information.