If you use Firefox, you can perform a lot of under-the-covers configuration if you type about:config into your address bar. The brings up a page that allows you to fully customize your browser. A lot of the entries in here can be customized using the normal editing of preferences, but many of the entries shown on this page are not editable through the normal menus of the browser.

My favorite mod to make here is the speeding up of the browser by requesting page resources in parallel. This was first detailed in the link below... here's the details:

1. Find the network.http.pipelining entry and set it to true
2. Find the network.http.proxy.pipelining entry and set it to true
3. Find network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set it to a number greater than 1... this is the number of requests that will be made in parallel. 10 is a good number for this.
4. Right-click anywhere and select New -> Integer. Name the new value nglayout.initialpaint.delay and set its value the value to 0.