Firefox going really slow

I’ve written before about Mozilla Firefox running very slowly on Linux. It’s not a matter of page loading time, but GUI response time. I’ll outline the problem as I understand it:

• The Gecko layout engine is working just fine, there’s no sluggishness of page loading

(though there are some issues with font sizes)

• The firefox extensions and themes seem to be working perfectly under Linux
• Initial application loadtime is rather large

(5-15 seconds on my machine at the moment)

• response to cursor placement in addressbar of search bar is slow

(1-3 seconds)

It may have something to do with the large number of extensions that I have installed, but I have the same number installed in my Windows machine at work and it doesn’t go slow at all. I’ll try reducing (or eliminating) extensions in the near future and I’ll post about whether that has any effect.