Don't trust the faster feel, usually its just a placebo effect. One of the most recent example of this, is when Firefox released 1.5 after 1.5 RC2 and tons of people talked about how much faster 1.5 was compared to 1.5 RC2. The 1.5 and 1.5 RC2 releases were the same, down to the byte. Don't expect the much of speed improvement on the maintenance builds.