Something I've always liked about Firefox is the community of developers who create custom builds of the program -- they take the source code and compile it with specific optimizations. Among the very best is the Stipespeed builds, created with optimizations for the most modern processors and markedly faster than the stock Firefox build right out of the box.
Stipe released his build of Firefox 2.0 back at the end of October. If you want to use it and you already have an existing Firefox install, all you need to do is unpack it into a directory by itself and run the firefox.exe executable. It'll attempt to register itself as "Bon Echo" (the development codename for 2.0; community builds of the program cannot officially be called "Firefox"). This way you can run Stipespeed in parallel with the original install; if you don't like it, you can always delete it and revert to the original by running the original application from its own directory. And since user preferences are stored in the user profile and not with the application, it's all the more convenient.
[Note: Vista users, you'll need to run Stipespeed as Administrator to get it to register as the default web browser.]
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