About the speed issue... Firefox has a 250ms delay where it waits for information before it starts loading the page. You can set the delay lower and you'll notice pages load a bit faster.
http://texturizer.net/firefox/tips.html#oth_rendering
Pipelining may also help increase your speed. Type "about
:config" into the address bar in Firefox and filter for "pipelining." Change the 3 results to true, 100, and true.