Is it just my PC or is Firefox really slow(poorly optimized), lately? OR is it Flash?

Not only you. Performance worsened in the latest builds. I used to have Opera 12 before the new Opera browser (based on chromium) and had over 100 tabs opened. Firefox managed the same quite well until recently. Might be Flash or Firefox or maybe both. Can't say for sure. Not gonna install Chrome, though as is worse than Firefox.

Check the laser disc as they are renowned for breaking down, especially after a long period of time

Hadn't noticed any difference, though I don't have flash installed, and I generally only have a couple of tabs open (still don't understand how people work with half a million tabs open). One thing I have noticed recently with Firefox is that if I am downloading something, say from here, and I switch the monitor off, when I get back after some time Firefox appears to have shut itself down and restarted, anyone had this?

What do you mean by really slow and compared to which other browser? I'm happy here with everything including my PC and Firefox. If anything startup time of Firefox could be a bit faster.

Personally i use a lot of older builds... v15 and v25. Sometimes they hog memory, and flash does cause the browsers to hang (usually waking from sleep/hibernation).

Not sure about the latest builds, sites and scripting usually is too convoluted anymore. I say make sure NoScript is installed and disable cross scripting that's not relevant. Maybe AdblockerPlus too, especially with flash ads...


edit: Could try FlashBlock, a happy medium for only allowing flash content you need (by enabling on case-by-case or site wide)

I just checked the floppy disk and there is no damage.

YesScript....

I think NoScript is a better choice. I'm recalling how a botnet was made using a proxy & javascript......

I will second NoScript.
Browsing Internet without NoScript is like going to swim in middle of ocean with heavy boulder hung around your neck. You will get tons and tons and tons of malware, attention of all botnets and what not. Especially when you like to visit sites which live from advertisements and host hundreds of them on single page (with potential to freeze your PC if you unblock all of them).

Also updating Firefox = bad. I am glad I have old distributive. Flash is also bad, it is widely proven now. Everyone switches from it to html5.

I wonder how did we browse internet when we had 64 and less MB of RAM. I am not entirely sure that heavily increasing requirements for simple stuff like internet browsing is the way to go with technological improvements. It is like making calculator, which can only add and subtract, but which requires i11 20 GHz and 128 GB RAM (with 64 GB VRAM for graphical frontend). Thanks, but I will use old and proven versions of calculator (browser in this case).

I got shot of FF ages ago. It just seemed to get slower ever update & worse, they were adding far too much crap that I didn`t want & would never need.

Palemoon, a FF spin off, is much better I`d say :)

It's edifying to see that I'm not the only one who's had problems with Firefox.

These days, I feel like Firefox has become less of a project dedicated to creating a good web browser, and more of a vanity project for the developers' egos.

Well i personally used Lynx, which is like 300k in memory at most... used that for a long time, works with html 1/1.1. Also there wasn't Javascript or very little of it, and it didn't extend to multiple sites as it does now.

Keep in mind HTML was a formatting language first and foremost, with hyperlinks to get around and navigating... And that's all it really needed to be. Also with huge memory restrictions the programs were written to minimize memory usage so 64Meg was actually quite a lot.

Not a general issue, and without steps to reproduce and a quantitative and qualitative description of the symptoms, nobody can compare the performance to yours.

I moved from Firefox to Pale Moon 1-2 years ago.
It's a fork from Firefox and in my experience faster and a lot more stable than Firefox. The crashes, none responding screens and the problem that the program is still active in the background have all gone.
I use the same add-ons that I used with Firefox with exception of Adblock Edge which has been replaced with uBlock.

You can import your settings etc. from Firefox. Add-ons have to be reinstalled through the add-ons manager. You might want to give it a try.