Snoopy: If you would like to do some expreiments, it would be cool to:

1. know what addon's you have in firefox.

2. Disable all addon's in firefox and try to use it for a little bit to see if there are speed differences.

... Not that I'm trying to get you away from using Safari - but would be cool if we could narrow down what addon's might cause issues.... in which that might help others who are also having issues.