Safari Much Slower Over Tethered 3G Than Firefox

Using 3G via thethered iPhone I've found Safari performance to be very poor. Using Firefox over the exact same setup is considerably faster, often 2 to 3 times faster to render a page.

I don't have regular access to WIFI at the moment to compare Safari versus Firefox performance there but I have tested both under a Windows 7 virtual machine and the performance difference over 3G remains the same.

Seems more like a networking/latency issue rather than a script/performance issue but why is Firefox so much quicker? Perhaps higher parrallelism in fetching negating latency?

Makes me wonder if Safari on my iPhone and iPad are performing as bad.

Can anyone confirm similar results?