Jason, we’ve been working on this. There were some big performance improvements in Firefox 6 and 7 and we’ve got a big hang fix that’s just about to hit in Firefox 8.
Can you grab an Aurora or Beta build and see if things are better?
I suffer quite a lot from Firefox performance issues since I need to run two instances on one machine, and Firefox 7 fixed ALL my hanging/swapping issues. Great job on that and I definitely urge everybody to upgrade.
While I'm here I'll add my usual "Dump Firefox? You can pry Tree Style Tab out of my cold dead hands" comment.
That said, I have also experienced the "we are not doing it cause we don't like it no matter how insanely useful it is to corporate users" attitude, eg. the perennial refusal to add overstrike:
"If I stop using the dev version, and switch to beta or (shudder) released, and turn off updating, will that give me the tabs back, or is it too late?"
Another satisfied Tree Style Tabs user here. After the AwesomeBar, that's the number two thing keeping me on FireFox. Especially now that version 7 cut its memory footprint in half.
Can you grab an Aurora or Beta build and see if things are better?