"Still it is so damn slow, it can go 2-3 minutes with nothing in the progress bar, then if I stop it and hit refresh, it may start, but get just to the very end and never quite complete the process to the site or page desired."

Do you have AdBlock installed? Some pages have a million extra bits that AdBlock can remove once you fine tune it, thus making many pages appear to load faster, cause you are not waiting for stuff/junk/potential malware that times out, but the page often won't finish loading till it all comes in.

I wouldn't recommend anybody NOT use Adblock....