I use Firefox as my default browser. It's great, and has a lot of cool features. But it loads up very sloooooooooowwwly!!

To avoid the pain, a couple of things to try:

1. Turn off automatic updates: FF checks for updates (to itself, to plugins and to search engines) very time you start it. This makes it very slow. So turning off automatic updates makes it very fast. To turn them off go to Tools --> Options --> Advanced --> Update check off all the Automatic Update checkboxes.
   
   
Note: This means that you don't get some required updates automatically. So you will have to do this yourself. Tools --> Add Ons --> Find Updates


2. Use FF Preloader --> https://sourceforge.net/projects/ffpreloader/.
   This pre-loads parts of FF into memory (RAM) and hence speeds it up.
   Note: There are folks who caution against doing this - it may cause FF to malfunction. I have not tried this myself.

Links:

• Tip about Automatic Updates: http://geekzguru.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/howto-speed-up-firefox-startup/
• FF Preloader tip: http://www.techiecorner.com/48/speed-up-firefox-start-up-time-with-firefox-preloader/