A post on the LatLong Blog states, We know that waiting for a program to startup can be really frustrating, so we improved our startup time by 25.

Tweaks in terms of memory utilization and shaders from that point on have also been made. All in all, the post promises, we can show more buildings, layers, and user content, and youll get a faster, smoother experience when youre flying around the globe.Since issues pertaining to speed can definitely be a stumbling block to adoption, version 5.1 of Google Earth could succeed at attracting new users. It might even be well positioned to make its debut in a lot of schools, if the old clunkers in computer labs werent capable of running it before.Regardless, this represents a nice treat for existing Google Earth fans. Have fun exploring the world at a faster pace.