The act of starting the document takes roughly the same time (a few miliseconds of difference on my average work PC).

However, this doesn't apply to the "waiting" time required for the Google Drive UI to load, which does take an awful lot of time (compared to the minimalistic FastDocs UI).

Thanks for the feedback! Yes, on my computer it's 85% faster using the direct links than loading drive.google.com. See the head to head matchup on the about page: fastdocs.co/about.html