Improving Firefox startup speed

Starting firefox used to take longer than Chrome and Opera on my laptop. However, after making some changes, the startup speed of firefox has improved dramatically. Here's what I did:

• Looked at the list of installed extensions, and disabled the ones that I am not actively using. I did not really uninstall them because I use them pretty rarely (every few months), and would not want to hunt for them again. It is much easier to re-enable them.

Path: Tools -> AddOns -> Extensions -> Disable

• Unchecked the option 'Always check to see if Firefox is the default browser'.

Path: Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Last checkbox on the 'General' tab.

• Unchecked all the options to automatically check for updates. From what I can tell, this had the highest impact on the startup time.

Path: Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Update tab.

Note: If using linux, your options will be in Edit -> Preferences.