There are many ways to tweak Firefox's settings to improve the browser's performance, but probably the most effective trick is to replace your favorite browser altogether with Swiftfox. It may sound as a drastic step, but there is no need to worry: Swiftfox is essentially Firefox optimized for specific AMD and Intel processors. The project features Swiftfox builds for AMD Athlon 64, Intel Core solo and Duo as well as assorted Pentium and Celeron processors. The best part is that Swiftfox detects and uses Firefox profiles. In fact, you can even run two browsers side by side if you are inclined to do so.

There are several ways to install Swiftfox on your machine. If you are running a Debian or Ubuntu-based Linux distro, add the Swiftfox repository to the sources.list file. To do this, open the file using the sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list command as root, and add the following line to the end of the list:

deb http://getswiftfox.com/builds/debian unstable non-free

Update the repository information using the apt-get update command, then install the Swiftfox package for your particular architecture, for example:

sudo apt-get install swiftfox-pentium-m

Alternatively, you can download the .deb package for your platform and install it using the dpkg tool:

sudo dpkg -i swiftfox_3.0.4pre-1_pentium-m.deb

On other Linux distros, you can use an installer script which installs Swiftfox in the /opt directory and adds a menu entry. The script also attempts to make the existing extensions available for Swiftfox. Finally, you can download a specific tarball archive and install Swiftfox manually.