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The Firefox profile manager and Chrome temporary files would let you test this theory.

I dont understand how profile could make such a difference but that is also my experience as well. Everything is fast in a clean profile.

On Firefox, if you have an unbelievably large number of entries in your History, Bookmarks, and/or Downloads (your Firefox "Library" — chrome://browser/content/places/places.xhtml), you could theoretically become limited by insert/update performance in Firefox's embedded sqlite, I believe.

The fix for 99% of firefox problems is: firefox -p, make a new profile