Mac OS X v10.7 introduced many changes to the user interface. Among them is the animation of opening new windows: They start as a small dot in the center of the final window position and grow quickly to the full size of the window. This is an animation which, in contrast to, e.g., the genie effect when minimizing a window, doesn’t transport any information, but instead makes window opening feel slow. Hence it is superfluous, in particular since closing windows is not animated. Unfortunately there is no GUI preferences setting to disable this animation, however the command line helps:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO

To turn on the animations again, just do

defaults delete NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled