I too am experiencing weird slow-downs that get progressively worse. Typing, switching windows and other things are super sluggish, but scrolling seems to be the worst offender, with the spinning ball showing up on every other scroll. It gets pretty bad quickly and becomes unuseable until quiting and restarting Firefox. I have never had a problem with FF before Firefox 5.0.1 and OS X 10.6.7

I want this fixed quickly please, I installed the software upgrade as requested but I've now got a sluggish and downgraded internet system - arrrghhh!

This is the same symptom as before on a previous upgrade, you quickly sent through another so please do the same again.

Sluggish doesn't describe 5.0.1 for Mac because it is insanely slow! I mean absolutely miserable. I thought maybe it was my ISP so did speed tests at two different sites and consistently get 18 to 20 mpbs so its not my ISP - its the friggin browser. I get the spinning beach ball almost all the time. I have tons of ram. I tweaked the config. I routinely clear history and then disabled history. I have it set to clear the cache/cookies/etc. whenever I close FF. NOTHING HAS HELPED. I downgraded FF to an earlier version but that made many of the addons I need and use stop working. If it weren't for the FF addons I would abandon FF and use Safari or Chrome. So can some nice person that knows how to do this stuff please fix this or at least give us detailed non-nerdy instructions on how to do it ourselves.

The other thing is that as much as I appreciate how pretty FF is now, its NOT worth it if we have to sacrifice performance.

Thank you for reading this.  :-)

- Firefox 5.0.1 for Mac

- OS X 10.5.8

I'm on Mac OS 10.6.8, with a 2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Xeon

6 GB of memory, plenty of disk space.

I have a similar problem, though not as severe as what's being discussed in this thread. Firefox is sluggish in keeping up with me from time to time. It certainly lags on quitting, too. I noticed this problem started happening when I upgraded to Firefox 5.0.1.

It looks like something in the browser software needs a little tweaking.

my browser when i playing a game on facebook or any other game it lags when im playing i have 3gb of memory windows 7 64 bit and how do i get this lagging to stop ive already cleared my cookies

If everyone here could make sure that you're running the latest version of both Firefox and your operating system, since I've noticed that some people may have updates to apply, that would be awesome. If that still doesn't work, it's possible your issue is fixed in an even newer version of Firefox, such as Firefox Beta. You could try installing that, and see if the issue's fixed. Note that this will cause Firefox to continue updating with beta versions. If you want to switch back to the general release version, you should download the latest general release version of Firefox from here.

I was having the same problem for about 6 months and have been trying to find the solution to this annoying lag problem.

I found a post that suggested that it was a Java problem so I Googled Java and my OS which is 10.4.11 and installed the version provided by Apple and VOILA, it is running smooth and fast again.

I hope it does the trick for you too. Try it!

I'm thinking about uninstalling FF, I feel like I have dial up again. Has FF even owned up to this being an actual issue?