What was happening is that:
- Mobile Firefox refused to display some pages when I used my home wifi, claiming bad certificate or to SSL or something else. Switching off the home wifi to the cellular provider solved that problem.
- Some addresses had been hijacked, when my Economist app tried to call home to go beyond headlines, I would get danger notices that would go to phishing sites if I ignored the warnings.
- On the desktop, some web destinations that I knew were good *sometimes* were blocked by FF's security mechanisms.
- A site that had changed its name-to-IP info a month ago refused to resolve properly, no matter how many times I tried to clear cache
- An automated program that fetched downloads via HTTPS often (but not always) failed with error 111 (connection refused), eventually it would succeed after many retries
The solution I tried, even before doing the benchmarks, was changing the DNS on the home DSL modem/router (which also did DHCP for the house) to Google's public DNS (8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4). All the above problems went away.
I subsequently ran namebench (have to invoke it with `python2`, won't run with the current version) which said that my existing (Google) setup was faster than any of the alternatives, including Teksavvy's outsourced CIRA server.
FWIW, next fastest was Primus(!) at 216.254.141.2