For all of those whining about the "slow speed" of FireFox: Have you tried to enable HTTP pipelining yet?
To do so, search for the file "prefs.js" in your FireFox profile folder (location depends on your OS, for Win2k/XP: "C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.wsi" with [User Name] = your windows user name), open it in the editor and add the following lines to it:
Code:
user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 8);
You can edit the "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" value as you wish, of course, but 8 should be more than sufficient.
If all this is too much hassle, download
Computerbase Mozilla Optimizer 1.63 (freeware; unfortunately German only, but pretty self explanatory) and unpack it to a folder of your choice, no installation needed. Start the .exe (make sure you have shut down FireFox first) and choose these options:
(if you check "Computerbase.de als Startseite", you'll set "computerbase.de" as your homepage)
Now click "Anwenden" to enable HTTP pipelining and a few other tweaks. By doing so, you'll add the following lines to your "prefs.js" file:
Code:
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 100);
user_pref("content.notify.ontimer", true);
user_pref("content.notify.interval", 100000);
user_pref("content.notify.backoffcount", 5);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 8);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections", 32);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 8);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy", 4);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server", 2);
user_pref("intl.accept_languages", "de, en, en-us");
If you want to add these settings manually to your prefs.js file, without using the tool, you can leave out (or edit) the last line, unless you are German that is.
If you should face any problems after using the tool (unlikely), you can revert the settings back to default by choosing the same options as can be seen above, with the exception of checking "Entfernen" (= remove) instead of "Hinzufügen" (= add).
This tweak should speed up page loading times considerably in most cases.