Profile Sync Daemon is a tool to move the web browser profile to RAM, using tmpfs, which has the advantage of reducing disk writes (useful for SSDs, some would say), increased speed and responsiveness.

The tool supports most browsers: Chromium, Google Chrome, Firefox (stable, beta, aurora and firefox-trunk), Conkeror, Midori, Opera (including Opera Next) and Qupzilla and is based on an old script (we've covered it on WebUpd8 back in 2009), with some extra features: this is a daemonized script and has recovery protection, as well as support for all the above mentioned browsers as opposed to the old script which only supports Firefox. It's also a lot easier to use.

Since RAM content is cleared on reboot, Profile Sync Daemon automatically syncs the profile back to the physical disk using a symbolic link and rsync at a given time interval. Furthermore, the profile is synced back to the hard disk before you shut down or restart your computer, so no profile data is lost. Still, use it at your own risk!

This isn't easy to benchmark because the performance decreases over time so you'd neet to check the SSD speed constantly for a few months to see exactly how the SSD is affected when TRIM is not enabled. But if your SSD read / write speed decreases a lot over time and you haven't enabled TRIM, this may be way.

Some articles mention using online discard - enabling TRIM by adding the "discard" option to /etc/fstab -, but there are many who say this isn't a good idea for most solid-state drives and you'll get a pretty significant performance hit when trying to delete a large number of small files. So below I'll let you know how to use both of these methods: online discard (not recommended) and the recommended way: using fstrim and a cron (anacron) job.

Some Ubuntu users are reporting LightDM errors when using a SSD: about half the time when starting the computer, LightDM (the default Ubuntu display manager) doesn't load correctly and only a black screen and a blinking command line cursor shows up. The issue isn't limited to those who are using a SSD, but it's a lot more frequent when booting Ubuntu from a solid-state drive.

I too am experiencing this issue with Ubuntu 12.10 (not tested on older Ubuntu versions because I didn't have a SSD when I was using 12.04) and I've found two possible workarounds which have worked for me so I thought I'd share them with you, in case you're experiencing the same issue.