... takes longer and longer to load every time you fire it up?
When my desktop running Windows XP crashed, FF had been taking a long time to load - I didn't time it but it would have been over a minute.

Now I'm using FF on a laptop running Windows 7 now, FF started off loading very quickly but after a few months it's taking longer & longer - I'm wondering if my growing list of bookmarks has anything to do with it?

I used Firefox for about 3 years during the time that it was the best fastest most secure browser on the web. About last year (right after a version update) I noticed it started crashing more and more frequently. Finally this year I switched to Chrome. I no longer think that Firefox is the best browser. I haven't had the speed issues you are mentioning, but just general instability...

One issue that sometimes slows down Firefox startup is the size of the Java cache, which used to default to 1GB! (I don't know if recent versions have change this...)

This article explains how to set it to a smaller size, which may result in a significant startup speed improvement.

Another very large factor in load up speed is the number and type of Addons you are using. Check to make sure they are always updated and to keep them to a minimum. Yes there are a ton of them that are really cool, but the more you add, the slower it loads and runs.

When I switched FFover to the laptop I restricted my Addons to Xmarks (bookmarking) and Tidy HTML (validator).
These would probably slow loading time a bit, Xmarks accesses a server to automatically synchronise bookmarks but as far as I know this only happens when closing FF.
Strangely, straight after initiating this thread FF fired up reasonably quickly which indicates the problem is probably not FF itself but something else.

Re Chad's comment - I haven't had FF actually crash but I too have noticed that other browsers have caught up with FF in the speed stakes - I wonder if FF is succumbing to the "designed by a committee" syndrome or is it just getting bloated?

@ Shunned: thanks for the link, I've reduced my Java cache from 1000MB to 300MB, I'll see if that helps.

I only ever used one addon, screenshot pimp. But good thing to check!

IE loads much faster than FF with a few addons for me.

FF load times can be all over the place on my main system, but today it's pretty fast and consistent -- easily under 2 seconds, and that's with about 20 addons/plugins. On the same system, same startup page, IE (with default BHOs only) takes around 4 seconds.

Using FF 3.6.14.

ff has been good to me as of late, but I loaded a no-no of an addon about a year or so ago and was doing weird things like crashing like crazy and taking forever with page loads,..just nasty stuff. After uninstalling the plugin, it didn't change so I totally uninstalled ff, and did a reinstall of ff and has worked great since.

Can you tell us which addon messedFF on your machine (so I can avoid it)?

My FF load time still varies a bit but its never as slow as it previously was.
The only change I've done is to reduce the java cache as suggested by Shunned.