Does Firefox seem way slower than Internet Explorer to you? Well it certainly is out of the box. I’m not sure why they don’t make the following settings default but check these out. They may change your opinion of the browser.
Type “about:config” in your firefox address bar.
Search for the following settings:
1. network.http.pipelining
Set to true
2. network.http.pipelining.firstrequest
Set to true
3. network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Set to 32
4. network.http.proxy.pipelining
Set to true
5. nglayout.initialpaint.delay
Set to 0
Its very likely that you won’t have an entry for network.http.pipelining.firstrequest. Thats ok. Just add one.
Right-click on the preferences list, select ‘New’ then select ‘Boolean’
On the first prompt, type:
network.http.pipelining.firstrequest
On the second prompt, set it to ‘true’
Its also likely that you won’t have an entry for nglayout.initialpaint.delay
Right-click on the preferences list, select ‘New’ then select ‘Integer’
On the first prompt, type:
nglayout.initialpaint.delay
On the second prompt, set it to ‘0′
Thanks to MatthewHSE and rise2it of WebmasterWorld for these settings. Thanks to rona for heads up on the nglayout.initialpaint.delay also not being present. Firefox is way faster for me and has enabled me to finally bail on IE.
How does it help? These are Matthew’s words:
Enabling the pipelining features allows the browser to make multiple requests to the server at the same time. The “maxrequests” is the maximum number of requests it will send at once. I’ve heard that 8 is the most it will send at once, but setting it higher won’t hurt, just in case. The initialpaint.delay is the length of time (in milliseconds) after the server response before the browser begins to paint the page.
After my business bought several Dells in the past few months I decided that I would try and save a few bucks and just do an upgrade on the couple of home machines that were lagging. Bad idea. 
