Speed up FireFox
This post on Hack-A-Day has instruction for getting to FireFox’s “advanced” configuration page. You can then make changes so that network pipelining is turned on, i.e., the browser will then make HTTP requests in parallel, greatly speeding up performance if you have sufficient bandwidth to handle the multiple requests.
I’ve set the number of parallel requests to 10, and it seems to make a noticeable difference.
Note that there are a number of servers that don’t cope with HTTP pipelining correctly so you may have some blank or messed up pages if you enable this “unsupported” feature.
Update: One site that noticeably doesn’t work well with network pipelining turned on is Google Maps. About half the map tiles take forever to load, or won’t load at all.