I have tried IE, Firefox and Google Chrome, and found Chrome to be the fastest by far. Still, this site is the slowest of all I inhabit, most of which use the same software setup. All are free sites, all are larger than this one. Imho it is the setup and maintenance. Since I've been a member here upkeep has been minimal at best, almost like an afterthought. No site I am a member of has fulltime admins. All have lives and occupations to pay their bills, so finding volunteers to take on a job like that is not so easy. But other sites have found a way, not sure why this one hasn't.

 

One of the biggest problems on this forum is the posters themselves, if everyone would resize their pictures to a size small enough to be seen ok but not oversized, it would help alot. I try to resize mine to less than 400pxl's. For example, my map at the bottom of the page is 347pxl's wide.