The Fox becomes a Snail?

Ever since I first used Mozilla Firefox a few years back, I have been a loyal user. I have used other browsers, aside from Internet Explorer, such as Avant and Maxthon but I quickly settled for Firefox as soon as I used it and haven't looked back since. What I like about Firefox is that it loads faster, is much easier to use and customize and is more secure than Internet Explorer.

Until last week, though.

Lately, I have been having problems with Firefox 2 at home. All of a sudden, Firefox has become extremely slow. What normally takes a few seconds to load, such as logging in to Blogger or opening my Gmail account, now takes more than a couple of minutes. I thought maybe my ISP, Smart Bro, is acting up again since I don't have problems with Firefox at the office. But then I used IE7 and Opera 9.23 and the pageload speeds were quite okay, way faster than Firefox's actually.

Unfortunately for me, the sites that load the slowest are the Google sites I frequently use such as Gmail, Google News, Image Search, Blogger, Analytics and others. It sucks that I now have to suffer very slow page loads while using my preferred browser at home.

What's the problem, Firefox? I have already tried uninstall/reinstall. I have also disabled extensions and add-ons including my StumbleUpon and ImageShack toolbars. There isn't any improvement. I guess I need to research further to find out what really caused Firefox's sudden slowdown. Sigh. I may have to settle with Opera for the meantime while I further investigate the fox's apparent transformation to a snail.

Update (8.24.07): Firefox is OK now.