When I was living in China, I used Tor daily to circumvent the great firewall. Back when the Tor bundle was using Firefox < 15, it has some bad memory leaks, but Mozilla has done a great job of fixing those. Chrome has turned into the memory hog. Chrome 2x memory usage has gotten so bad, I’m actually thinking about finding an old full install of a 0x or 1x for my laptop.

As far as it being slow to load sites, there will always be a high latency when using Tor. It’s the nature of onion routing. If Tor becomes more popular, I’m hoping there will be a way to donate to high bandwidth exit nodes to keep the network performance up.