The way I have dealt with this is to avoid the AJAX interface to GMail and just use the HTML interface for good startup performance and the Mobile interface for screaming fast and efficient performance. For reference, my bookmarks for those are:

https://mail.google.com/mail/h/

and

https://mail.google.com/mail/x/

You can use just http:// at the beginning if you want even better performance but initially accessing GMail with a https:// causes the secure connection not to be dropped after authenticating. Therefore, your email will not be transmitted in plain-text over a wireless connection at a public access point. Not super important since email gets transmitted in plain-text between mail servers but a small thing that I like to do.

/Mike