Maybe a lighter windowmanager or desktop environment and a lighter and faster
browser would be OK.

but i love firefox, and it works well with my windows machines as well as with
all previous versions of ubuntu i have used.

Your experience is not universal. FF generally runs well on Ubuntu. However,
many add-ons can slow it down. You can also install FF's betas which give
better performance. Most people that I talk to find that Google's Chrome or
Chromium runs faster than FF. You can also give Opera a try. It is quite
fast. I am running FF3.5 and the betas and all are fast on my system. It is
difficult to make comparisons between OSes and distros. There are too many
things that could account for any perceived difference. It could be due to
the OS itself or the compiled offering that you are using and whatever you
have running at the time, including different add-ons. You could also try
going naked... that is, running it without any add-ons.

i did turn the add-ons off, and it was still the same. i have two windows
machines and three ubuntu to compare ff with.

Which browser(s)?...................

ff 3.5.6------also have ff on my windows machines and all is ok.

So, by "9.10 slow" you mean the web browser you use is slow to load web
pages?

Which web browser?

FF has some known issues on recent versions of linux due to performance
problems with sqlite - beta versions of FF are said to be faster, but
google chrome leaves them all in the dust in my experience. I've
switched to google chrome as my default browser and for e.g. facebook
apps which are flash and javascript intensive, it's quite a bit faster
than FF.

I also prefer the behavior of chrome over firefox when there are
multiple tabs open and one of the tabs is waiting for a response from a
remote site. In this scenario, the whole FF is completely unresponsive
while waiting, but in chrome, all the other open tabs continue to
respond normally while the one tab is waiting on the remote server.

Once I got used to chrome, FF has seemed slow, sluggish and clunky.

Just my .02

yes, 3.5.6 ff. i tried chrome and went back for reasons i cant remember. at
least im glad to hear there IS a problem!

Nobody said you have to choose just one browser - why not install
several and compare - chrome, ff-3.5, ff-3.6, opera, seamonkey...

Chrome only recently reached a usable state for me. If it's been awhile
you might want to have another look. Now that the flash plugin works
with chrome, I hardly ever use firefox, and chrome addons, while new,
are also beginning to show up.

I added this line to my apt sources and installed it with synaptic.

deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable main

I use lots of browsers and a few window managers and desktop environments. As
for browsers, I use Firefox, Seamonkey, Chrome, Opera, Midori, Epiphany,
Konqueror.

Recently installed flock, hate its flashy in your face stuff when you
first open it. However once you get passed the crap it is a good solid
browser.

do you have a link for chrome addons? i think what i didnt like about it was
cookie management.

http://chrome.google.com/extensions

You can also navigate to that URL via the chrome preferences menu -