I went through the same thing. All of this is due to the crap that Microsoft and Sun went though in their lawsuit(s). You have to install Java on new Windows boxes too and that can also be a pain.
It's a common complaint about FireFox and other alternative browsers but once you have it set up, you're all set.
Check out the extensions to the browser (there are tons of them) and the themes (lots of them too) which allow you to change the appearance of your browser.
If you're using my version of FireFox, you must be running on a machine that supports SSE2 (Pentium 4 and up, and newer AMD chips). I'm playing around with some code that should improve JPEG rendering performance by another ten to twenty percent but it will take me a few days to get a distribution of that code out.