problems with firefox running slowly lately (Score 1)

I've been a fan of Firefox for about a year now. In the last few months it has been running really slowly on every machine I use it on. I've spoken to my coworkers and they've noticed the same thing. I tried switching to Opera after reading on slashdot that it runs faster then IE7 and Firefox http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/07/044243/ It does seem to run noticeably faster. Has anyone heard if Microsoft did to Firefox what it did to ICQ? (slowed it down by patching Windows to benefit MSN and detriment ICQ) just adding my two cents