file open dialog settings?

[Stanislav Maslovski <stanislav maslovski gmail com>]

Hello,

Are there any user-level settings to the file open dialog
to make it faster on large directories? Firefox when
opening /usr/bin is extremely slow.

strace shows that it makes a long series of stat() calls
on every file in /usr/bin followed by repeating pattern
of open(), fstat(), mmap(), read(), close(), munmap() calls
for every found file. Can I disable this second
repeating sequence of calls? I can survive without seeing
separate icons for binaries and shell or perl scripts.

Googling did not help (except that I saw a lot
of complains on the gtk file open dialog).

Thanks,
-- 
Stanislav