firefox slowdown and instability
 

firefox upgraded itself to 5.0. now it is very slow, and unstable. i also put in a usb 3.0 card and hd. the last time this happened, an ad blocker had to be disabled. vista 6.0, firefox 5.0, ati video card, 4 gig ram, asus computer, amd quad something processor, panda antivirus , ........

We assume they'll get this worked out, but many people are reporting this phenomenon. So in the meantime, 5 Things To Do When Firefox Runs Slow ...

I haven't noticed a difference in Firefox 5. Some flash videos were slow, but I realized it was actually MS Security Essentials hogging the CPU when I was watching flash videos.

In the meantime, try starting Firefox in safe mode (disables all plugins) and see if that fixes it. There's a shortcut in the Firefox folder in the Start menu to start in safe mode.

No problems for me on a ThinkPad T500 with Win7 and 4GB RAM.

You can always roll back to version 4 or even version 3 if it helps, then wait for the next update on version 5.