Regarding remoting, I've found that running firefox through ssh -X makes sshd on the server max out the CPU and cause a very slow repaint. But eliminate ssh from the equation (use X11 forwarding without ssh, just let the remote firefox talk directly to your local X11 server) and firefox performance is indistinguishable from running it locally. Of course, for insecure network it's a bit of a hazard, but my usecase is forwarding a firefox instance running in a local virtual machine, so it's fine. Firefox over ssh -X brought me to the edge of sanity. I recommend trying direct X11 forwarding if someone has a similar problem and usecase (security-wise).
Obviously it depends on your use case whether this is useful, but I recommend just using your local Firefox and configuring it to tunnel connections over the SSH connection as a SOCKS proxy using "ssh -D".
