Gomez (http://www.gomez.com), which specializes in web site and application performance analytics, says that the iPad is proving surprisingly swift when it comes to web browsing.

In fact, the new Apple tablet often outperforms netbooks — perhaps its closest rival product category — when it comes to interacting with a majority of popular web sites, according to the research group. In preliminary results, Gomez said that 74% of the pages, on what it determined to be the top 50 most visited sites by iPad users, loaded faster on the iPad than on netbook computers in the U.S.