Sadly, I didn't notice any speed increase after turning it off. It still has trouble panning pages smoothly most of the time, the sidebars (for tabs and /favs/back/forward) are sluggish, and the general performance seems quite low.

And, yea, it seems like most of the performance hit occurs during page loading, so I'm surprised that the abovementioned "solution" doesn't work (at least for me) as it is supposed to address that issue.