Firefox 17 is extremely slow

I was “forced” to download Firefox 17, you know the hidden upgrade it does when you’re not looking, and I must say that this is the slowest browser I have ever seen.  It’s equivalent to a 56k modem speed kind of browser; not even kidding.  I do not know why this browser is so slow, it takes literally about 3 minutes or more to open simple web pages.  It’s the kind of slow that I went to the bathroom and came back and it was still loading the page. The kind of slow that I went downstairs, cooked some food in the microwave kind of slow; yeah, like that.  To make sure it wasn’t my computer I loaded the same page in Chrome and it was instant as usual so the problem is Firefox, not my computer.  Even Internet Explorer was loading fast, hard to believe  I know.  So I am going back to Firefox 16 and disabling the autoupdate because I’ve seen other people complain of the same thing so it’s probably a bug.  This is ridiculous.