Internet Explorer 7 is slow

I have:

4GB of RAM, 2GHz dual core CPU with 6690 MIPS and 4445 MFLOPS.
That is my CPU’s internal clock ticks 2 billion times per second (try making an empty for loop that loops 2 billion times and see how long it takes) and it executes 6690 million instructions per second and has two processing cores which basically means it’s 2 CPUs.

Now, it takes 2 seconds for Internet Explorer 7 to open a new tab for me!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (It’s really annoying sometimes)
Also, after using IE7 for a while and having many tabs open, it used to slow down and start using like 80% of my CPU, so I had to turn a lot of my add-ons off and that helped fix the issue to some degree.

I’m thinking of moving on to Firefox, the only thing about IE is that, it’s smooth and I like it, but Firefox feels like a truck to me, the 3rd version of Firefox is nicer though