I'm by no means an expert, but I think it depends on how you use it. Yes, it'll decrease your firefox startup time, but so will just keeping a firefox window open. It'll use less memory than that, and be somewhat slower.

If you find yourself closing and opening firefox very often, and don't mind your computer slowing down a bit while you're not using it, run it. Otherwise, just leave metachat open permanently and you'll need it.

I'm not a fan. It preloads pages in the background so that when you click on links, it loads them from memory and looks as though you have really good bandwidth.

PROBLEMS:
- For slow computers on broadband, things may actually get slower.
- It may automatically preload pages you don't want to go to (Like the logout page)
- It wastes website bandwidth. This is a bit rude.

Give it a go for a few days though. I may be wrong.

My bad. Wrong end of the stick. I should have followed the link. Please ignore everything I said.

I don't think this is a pre-fetcher, seanyboy -- I think it just loads the Firefox exe into memory on startup so that launches faster.

Too slow!

"And you won't need it."

Ok, so perhaps it's a good idea to close metachat once in a while and go to bed.

psyche!

Personally, I'd try this only after:
* Tweaking Firefox (there are a number of settings which may help)
* optimizing computer, including defrag drive, ensuring a good empty cache block, ruthlessly eliminating unnecessary taskbar items, etc.
* adding as much RAM as you can afford (really, it's always cheaper than the last time you checked)
* adding another hard drive, even an older one

Mainly, this is because a preloader will only give you so much, so you'd have to do these things anyway eventually. And some of them help all your other programs, too.

Firefox's worst sin is its RAM usage, and under Windows that's serious because Microsoft is a major offender as well, and they convince vendors to give you minimal configurations that maybe can't really support heavy use under Windows. If the OS were more compact, or the requirements more pragmatic, this wouldn't be a problem.