firefox issue

[Gerhard Magnus]

I'm running Ubuntu 13.04 and the distribution's version of Firefox 
(21.0, Mozilla Firefox for Ubuntu canonical - 1.0).

Loading a webpage these days seems to involve an ever-increasing number 
of separate downloads, with the bottom left corner of the Firefox window 
flashing a succession of messages like "Connected to...", "Now 
loading...", "Waiting for..." etc. Often the browser seems to hang at 
whatever process is underlying one of these messages. In most cases, 
such a hang eventually clears up on its own. But being impatient, I 
click the red "X" (stop loading this page) in the address bar and then 
the arrow in the blue circle (reload current page) and the webpage 
immediately resumes loading.

Any thoughts as to why this works? Is there a way to set Firefox to do 
it automatically?