Do you have that problem when running in the Firefox SafeMode?
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode
Don't select anything right now, just use "Continue in SafeMode."

If not, see this:
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/troubleshooting+extensions+and+theme...

please try to disable hardware acceleration in firefox to see if that makes any difference. in order to do that, go to tools > options > advanced > general

The-edmeister and Madperson,

Thank you for your suggestions. The typing-echo speed improved dramatically and is now certainly acceptable. Not perfect, but, acceptable. I do not know which of your suggestions solved my problem. I implemented both of them at the same time, and the problem went away. (By "perfect", I mean "just as good as Firefox 6.)

Even more important to me, the typing-echo speed in gmail is now perfect. I think it was Firefox 8 where the typing-echo speed in gmail was horrible on my machine. The Firefox programmers must have done some good work between then and now.

A great side benefit from your suggestion, the-edmeister, was that I learned how to bring up FF in safe mode. This is not at all obvious from the labels on the FF 12.0 menus. Also, while implementing your suggestion, I realized that the FF 12.0 "safe mode" replaced the older "restore Firefox to original defaults".

Another side benefit is that understanding "safe mode" made the "Reset Fixes Many Problems" article intelligible to me. This is important to me because the "Reset" article comes up every time I search Firefox for a solution. That article contains a lot of useful information. Knowing that "safe mode" replaces the older "restore Firefox to original defaults" is the "key" that allows me to use that information.

(Maybe some day that article will be updated to include this "key" so that other beginners like me can also use the information in that article.)

The speed of the cursor movement is often still slower than I would like, but, I can "work around" that problem by using the mouse click to move long distances and by using "control arrow" to move short distances. I could not "work around" the slow typing-echo speed, except by changing browsers. And, I really would like to stay with Firefox.

Disabling the hardware acceleration helped quite a bit. And definitely running it on safe mode makes it better.

Is there a way to always run firefox on safe mode?

safe mode is primarily designed to be troubleshooting tool. however in the next firefox version 13 you'll have the possibility to easily "refresh" firefox in the help section. all settings except your personal data like bookmarks, passwords, etc can be reset to the default what will have similar effect to running firefox in safemode.

mgregorio:

I found that I only had to run FF in safe mode once. After I rebooted FF, safe mode was turned off, and the performance improvement persisted. That was a good thing. I was very happy.  :)

On the other hand, I still get slow typing in FF from time to time on my Windows XP Professional (SP3) machine. But, it never lasts long, and is not a problem. I have never have slow typing on my Windows 7 machine with FF.

John

I have been having similar problems with the Zoho Writer site for months. I thought it was just because they completely redesigned their site but it got so bad recently, I sent support at Zoho an email, and they suggested this forum. They are aware of the problem and are trying to fix it (tho it's been that way, as I mentioned, for quite a while now. I disabled the hardware acceleration tab and that has helped considerably, tho still not what it should be. What is the DISadvantage of disabling hardware acceleration? Will it affect anything else?