I just found this trick for Firefox. I am getting much better response times from the browser now. I hope it works for you too.

1.Type about:config into the address bar and hit return.

2. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which speeds up page loading.

3. Alter the entries as follows:

Set network.http.pipelining to true
Set network.http.proxy.pipelining to true
Set network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to some number like 20. (This means it will make 20 requests at once.)

4. Right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer.
Name it nglayout.initialpaint.delay and set its value to 0 (zero). (This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.)

Close your browser after you make the changes. If you're using broadband hopefully you'll load pages a lot faster now.