If you want to improve the speed of firefox, do the following:
Type "about:config" into your address bar, wait for it to load, then alter the following entries: change "network.http.pipelining" to "true", "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true", "browser.turbo.enabled" to "true" and lastly "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to 30, meaning it will be able to make 30 requests at once.