Since I literally live on Firefox when I am using my NetBook (which in itself is not as fast as you would like…), the notion of finding ways to speed up and generally make the Firefox experience better is a worthwhile topic.
First off, there are some general quality improvements which you can make. Using a specific DNS service such as OpenDNS is worthwhile. First off, it’s free (for simple basic users like me, and most likely you) it is a service which is reputable and gives you a few special tricks such as adding in direct shortcuts. An example would be that on my Firefox install, I merely have to type in ‘riehler’ into the task bar and it loads up this blog (i.e. http://www.riehler.com …this blog). But generally you get solid service and a modicum of security from such annoyances as Phishing, proxies, and other malware and botnet exploits.
With this in place, there are plenty of things that you can do ‘under the hood’ of Firefox. The list of specific things to tune is gargantuan, so I would suggest heading over to Make Use Of’s The Ultimate Guide to Speeding up Firefox 3.5 first.
With this background information, you can then continue with these other sites…
How to Speed Up Your Firefox Browser
http://www.blogsdna.com/6522/how-to-speed-up-your-firefox-browser.htm
Speed up Firefox by Moving Your Cache to RAM, No RAM Disk required
http://lifehacker.com/5687850/speed-up-firefox-by-moving-your-cache-to-ram-no-ram-disk-required
How-To: Speed Up, Customize, and Secure Firefox
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/howtos/howto_speed_up_customize_and_secure_firefox_chrome_ie8_and_opera
