I am trying to get a feel for what is going on here, I have recently installed Debian 6.0, and Iceweasel from the Debian repositories. I also have Google Chrome installed. I can brwose for hours with chrome, without a hiccup, but (almost 100%) as soon as I try to use iceweasel, the connection goes to crap. Pages load slowly or refuse to load at all. And worst of all it seems to have an effect on Chrome's performance as well, as it also starts timing out on pages. After some time, and Iceweasel shut off, all seems to go back to normal.
I know I am being vague and this is very odd. I have no idea where to begin trouble shooting. I have a bit of extra software installed, and all other internet apps seem to be un-affected-such as torrent apps, skype, etc....Just web browsing.
Any help is appreciated, or anyone else experiencing this problem would being interesting to hear from.
Thanks,
Steve

I'm running Debian Wheezy, & I don't bother with IceWeasel. At the moment I'm browsing with the firefox nightly build a.k.a Minefield, & it seems pretty good. I downloaded it & extracted it to my home dir, so there's no confusion with packages etc.& it auto updates easily, because its not in /usr/lib. Have you got extensions installed with IceWeasel - it could be them. Also, up to a couple of weeks ago I was using an old Toshiba Satellite laptop, with half a gig of RAM & when I used firefox, the disk was thrashing & it was really slow, Chrome was a bit better, but not perfect by a long way. I've got a new quad core desktop PC now & the difference is huge.
So it could be a) the firefox version, b) extensions c)I had a Flash problem as well - Gnash isn't bad but its not there yet & I had issues with Flash-using sites(e.g. eBay selling), until I installed Adobe's latest version.(d) Your machine would be happier with a lighter-weight browser
I know exactly the sort of thing you mean, it was driving me mad with its slowness, & it was sending the load average through the roof, which of course impacted everything else.
What machine are you using?

Sometimes those problems come from Iceweasel trying to use IPV6. You can disable that and look if that solve your problems.
To do that type about:config in your address-bar and press Enter. Ignore the warning and press the button, then type ipv6 into the filter-field. There should be a configuration entry named network.dns.disableIPv6, just double-click on it to set it to true. Restart Iceweasel and look if your problems still occur.

I feel pretty dumb, I have narrowed this problem down to my landlord's router, I switched to my clearwire/personal router, I can web browse at a normal speed, however the over all data transfer rate is much slower...odd. Thanks for the advice though.

@ andy i'm running a pretty new computer, with a 2.8 GHz AMD phenom II. I've got 2 Gigs of RAM, and a decent video card. It should tear through any resource heavy browser (it does). I have experimented with just about every browser and despite its downfalls, Iceweasel/firefox have been the best for me, google chrome is good to, but it seems to use a ridiculous amount of RAM if I do any tabbed browsing. I would just use firefox, but I had dependancy issues...all of my other installs have been with a debian repository, so dependency issues are nill. Thanks again, Now all I have to do is get the password to that router....

Sorry for writing in an old post, but this was the first result I found on google. Anyway, thanks for pointing me to disable ipv6, this way the problem is solved and now Iceweasel doesn't takes ages to load webpages as it used to (it stalled in looking up host, connecting to host, and the like). Now I'll try to install iceweasel 4/5/6 to get a better performance because 3.5.x sucks big balls.

Thanks again and best regards!