Over on the Macworld OS X Forums, 'd00d' published a pointer to a Mach-O build of Mozilla with a patch to enable ATSUI (Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging). What does that mean in plain English, more or less? Mach-O can be faster than normal CFM coding, and ATSUI allows Carbon apps to have nicely anti-aliased text. [edited - see comments for a link about a Mach-O vs CFM speed discussion]
I downloaded the build and tried it out. It's notably faster and pages now render just as nicely as they do in OmniWeb. Not everything works (plug-ins and some CSS stuff gave me some trouble), but it is a peek at what Mozilla could be. Unfortunately, there's no indication that Mozilla 1.0 will follow this direction; it will still be a CFM-based non-ATSUI application.
If you'd like to check it out for yourself, you can download the Mach-O Mozilla build from the mac.com page of 'stevekstevek.' Make sure you download all three files and then read the README.rtf file for instructions on how to make it work.
It's a shame this won't make it into the 1.0 production tree for Mozilla; I guess that leaves Chimera as possibly the best bet for an anti-aliased, speedy, Mozilla-based browser at the moment. [edited]
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020410094247361