high priority tasks

whilst installing or extracting when you click to start a program, such as firefox, this program will take ages to start. i pressume that the problem here is that windows 8.1 is trying to prioritize tasks. i have an i7 processor and 8gb ram so multitasking shouldnt be an issue.

There are several approaches you can take. You can run FF minimized after some delay, at login. You can run FF out ot a ram disk. The ram disk is a good option if you don't save sessions. If you save sessions then it can slow down shutdown as the ramdisk image is written to HD. Another is to open FF to about:blank as it starts much faster. Then open your pages.

I've been very pleasantly surprised with Opera x64 12.14. I use a small utility I wrote called BrowserBunch to oen several urls with a browser. The program uses a window with 6 buttons so you may choose which browser to open the url set with. If you would like to try BrowserBunch, it's free and may be downloaded here

I know I never liked to just leave a browser open. But it may be the simplest solution.