2008/9/17 Andrew Garrett andrew@epstone.net:
Chrome handles it fine on Windows (Dual core 2.4GHz, 2GB of RAM or so). 2-3 seconds to load completely.
Firefox 3 on my computer takes maybe five seconds, and I've heard there are at least some SVG speed improvements in 3.1:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2008/07/svg_filter_perf.html
Regardless, even a two-second render time is probably unacceptable for inclusion into a page, and times even five images it's certainly not tolerable. I certainly wouldn't call it "fine" to wait an extra two seconds for a page to load. All client SVG implementations need to become considerably faster before it's likely to be a good idea to include complicated SVGs in web pages. Better hardware might even be needed, given the costs of rasterization, but I don't know enough to say whether that's true or not.