Also, I stumbled across a HUGE performance tweak you can do to Firefox that you can use if you’re on broadband (cable modem, DSL, etc…)  There are many other tweaks on this page, but the following instructions were the only ones I found worth mentioning.

9. Speed up Firefox.

If you have a broadband connection (and most of us do), you can use pipelining to speed up your page loads. This allows Firefox to load multiple things on a page at once, instead of one at a time (by default, its optimized for dial-up connections). Heres how:

• Type about:config into the address bar and hit return. Type network.http in the filter field, and change the following settings (double-click on them to change them):
• Set network.http.pipelining to true
• Set network.http.proxy.pipelining to true
• Set network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to a number like 30. This will allow it to make 30 requests at once.
• Also, right-click anywhere and select New -> Integer. Name it nglayout.initialpaint.delay and set its value to 0. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.