I was just about to give up completely on Firefox on my iBook. Flash applets would either perform poorly or do horrible things to the mouse focus, it would often chew up all available CPU time after a while, and I was still stuck with version 1.0.7 since the 1.5 series would reliably freeze on me within an hour or two.
Fortunately, I gave Firefox 2 RC2 a spin for a few days, and things are much improved. The tab freeze doesn’t happen, Flash performs better (about the same as in Safari now), and…it still chews some CPU, but not as much as it used to.
Well, that sounds hopeful; especially since it seems just about *any* webpage chews up all my CPU these days. I don’t have the other issues you do (especially since I picked up Logitech’s MX400, and upgraded the LCC as well — but don’t use the new version with anything less than new laser mice; apparently laser-guiding makes a massive difference to tracking, and older mice work horribly under the new LCC…), but the system load gets worse by the day, and any foreseeable relief would be welcome.
I tried a couple of the betas, but since they disable all of the plugins I use (use Fx without Adblock? Inconceivable!), I’ll wait for the final release. You know. Within the next 2 months. If they don’t postpone it. Again. :-)
I’ll never get used to the fact that web surfing is now harder on resources than Photoshop, or even high-end gaming.
Man, I miss Lynx. :-)
P.S. – MX400: Nicest. Mouse. Ever. Made. Period.