firefox slow/hang load images and yahoo mail

[benchmark]

Basic info:
 System 5.3
 portupdate last night
 build firefox 1.0.3
 build linuxwrapper, flashplugins, etc.

A few problems I noticed:
a) firefox is very slow loading any site with images. For example,
loading www.nyt.com, the text content comes up very quickly, but then
it takes forever to load the images.

My question: is this a problem with my graphics or it's firefox? it
seemed to me to be a problem with firefox.

b) when i try to login in my mail account at yahoo, it just hangs. 
I checked with my windows xp's firefox loading at the sametime, there
were no problems. So it's no the problem with the network connection
or the website itself.

Is there anything (like plugins, or libraries, etc) that I need to tweak?

thanks.