Good tutorial!
It's true that blocking ads/spyware/adwares by hosts does speed up the browsing. I run adsuck on my machine and it has considerably changed the browsing experience. Adsuck supports regex and it is suppose, from the man page, to be faster than the normal hosts file. The hosts file that I have is huge, pretty experimental, and blocks hosts that some individuals might want to visit. It's radical but it's a better solution for me to unblock the hosts that I really want little by little. (You can find it on GH if you want to try it)
I also wanted to have a cookie whitelist until I found that it was already implemented in Firefox.

On a side note, lifting the weight from the browser can have it's good point. Let the browser do the browsing and only that. For adblocking you can use a DNS server like kopri did or use adsuck, for downloading you can use external download managers like aria2 and axel, for viewing sources you can use your favorite text editor, for web request analysis you can use burpsuite, and so on...

Keep up the awesomeness!