I use FireFox to view is there any info I can capture next time it's slow which for me is often 
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Just a thought. This is something Ive mentioned to a few people over the past couple of weeks, but firefox has become increasingly slow for me and Im even considering permanently swapping over to another browser because of this. Im getting quite used to it now crashing every other day.. and it has become sluggish and slow. There is definitely some sort of memory issue with it which I have noticed will cause slowness. Its not unusual for it to be taking anything up to 4GB of my RAM and Ive even seen it at 6GB once. Its currently at 1.8GB of RAM for me, and thats with me force crashing it from task manager just this morning. Once it consumes about 2-3GB it starts slowing down everything I am doing.
yeah its broken in my view.
To fix crashes using a 64bit build is probably enough.
Problem is 64bit builds dont fix the slowdowns and cycle collector hangs.
Chrome is not only faster but its also way more stable, if for some reason a tab will crash it wont crash the entire browser either. It does slow down if you have many tabs open like me but only a small amount, not severe like firefox.
Firefox E10 can be enabled even in stable builds now but some extensions break including noscript and it seems to be implemented badly as it doesnt yield the speed gains I would expect, it makes startups way faster and reduces hangs a lot, but general sluggyness remains. I think the core problem is down to aggressive heavy cycle and garbage collection code in firefox but the dev's stubbornly wont add an option to disable it.
Opera is probably the best port of chrome if you want a port not made by google. Opera is 32bit only tho. Also I think none of the ports have the DRM codecs needed for things like netflix, only chrome has it (not 100% sure).
Finally a lot of privacy related stuff can be disabled using command line options, here is my launch batch file I use to move temp files to my ramdisk and adjust lots of security and performance settings.
start chrome.exe --cipher-suite-blacklist=0x009c,0xc009,0xc00a,0xcc15,0x009e --enable-ssl-false-start --disable-3d-apis --disable-backing-store-limit --disable-breakpad --disable-client-side-phishing-detection --disable-cloud-import --disable-direct-write --disable-directwrite-for-ui --disable-java --disable-password-generation --disable-preconnect --enable-remote-fonts --disable-webgl --disable-webrtc --disk-cache-dir=R:/CHROME2 --disk-cache-size=524288000 --dns-prefetch-disable --enable-async-dns --disable-potentially-annoying-security-features --disableOFF-precise-memory-info --disable-strict-mixed-content-checking --enable-strict-powerful-feature-restrictions --enable-smooth-scrolling --enable-tcp-fastopen --processOFF-per-tab --disable-background-mode --no-pings --purge-memory-button --enable-offline-auto-reload-visible-only --disable-sync --disable-offline-pages
