The site is obviously great despite that (and certainly also impressive).
It looks like a magazine page (perhaps one you'd see advertising architecture, or furniture) made flesh in the browser: the pictures are too big, the headlines are too big, the text column wanders from the left side of the page to the right, and it does all of this with highly excessive CPU consumption.
On Firefox it's particularly painful - on an i7 920, merely selecting text takes over a second - while even on Chrome, the fans start up and blare as a core hits 100% for several seconds as the page loads.
It's not down to custom fonts either, as I have those disabled in Firefox.
It all adds up to make me want to avoid the site in future, knowing I'll be assured of a laggy unpleasant experience.
I wonder if it's some kind of plugin issue, Firebug is a monster consumer of resources for example.
That said, if the content is good enough, i can deal with that. Maybe I'll just block JS for this site since i suspect that's the primary issue here.
There are no speed issues on my laptop browser or ipad...
according to wikipedia:
On April 3, 2011, The New York Times posted an article on their website announcing that "eight of the more prominent editorial and technology staff members at Engadget have left or are leaving AOL and are about to build a new gadget site". The group included former Engadget editor in chief Joshua Topolsky, managing editor Nilay Patel, editors Paul Miller, Joanna Stern, Chris Ziegler, and Ross Miller, product manager Justin Glow, and developer Dan Chilton.
I think some of the top-level editors of Engadget left to start The Verge. Because of this, the actual product reviews on Engadget, which I initially liked, have decreased in robustness as well.