OS X :: Unable To Load Images On Firefox/Safari?

I've avoided asking this question for over a year but I just can't take it anymore.

Ever since I got my first macbook pro(Tiger) in 2006, I've had a pretty poor web-surfing experience when it comes to pages with a large quantity of images.

Whether it's in Firefox or Safari, it seems it takes forever to load jpegs, gifs, pngs, etc., much slower than in Windows.

And more often than not, it'll often just stop trying to load some of the images and leave empty frames instead. An annoying side effect of these situations is that I won't be able to load other websites in separate tabs until I wait 2 or 3 minutes at least.

It almost mimics what happens when you just plain lose your internet connection. My best example is www.fark.com.

Sometimes posters will post large quantities of images, 100+. Heck, what am I saying, sometimes it's not even that much but Firefox and Safari will still choke trying to retrieve the pictures.

I set aside the macbook for this very reason because I often open multiple tabs at once when I surf..and if one of those tabs just happen to be image-intensive, my whole surfing experience will grind to a halt until whatever process is happening times itself out.

I THOUGHT the problem would be fixed with Leopard..but it hasn't. I've searched the forums but I haven't found anything useful, although I've caught small stories here and there of people having the same issue, but nothing widespread.

The whole problem starts with image files...and sometimes it doesn't necessarily need large quantities to choke. Just a modest amount will do sometimes.

Any ideas?? Is it my router? (WRT54G) My DSL connection? (Yahoo SBC) It happens on either wireless or with cable. My windows boxes don't have this problem.

Not having images load is bad enough, but having your browser stall is just insufferable! (I'm also using a brand new Macbook Pro so this problem stems across two revisions)