FasterFox and Google Web Accelerator. Combine that with CustomizeGoogle and it’s a whole different interwebs.
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I dunno, personally, I’ve tried it both ways and it seems like if you leave your browser open for long periods of time it actually slows things down.
Then again, when I close FireFox, it’s regularly using 850MB of ram =\
I never said that you should leave the browser open: that almost certainly does more harm than good.