Tim Haines points to a Firefox speed-up configuration tip that did indeed make Firefox noticeably faster. I clicked on the same link from the Google News page in both browsers to an article in the Jamaica Observer. I counted to almost 8 until the page loaded in Maxthon and to only 3 in Firefox.
But what impressed me right away was the configuration setup in Firefox and how you could get to it by typing “about:config” in the address bar. Here's the screenshot of the resulting configuration settings. Double-click on any line and the settings change. Sweet! And to add a new item (as shown here), just right-click.
