Why is GMail SOOOO SLOW on my PowerBook?

I have been a long time PC/Windows guy. I have been using them since 1985, and have been using Windows since 1991 (3.0). I have gotten very tired over the last couple of years dealing with spyware, viruses and trojans, and, especially after the Blaster worm that ravaged through DEP in August, 2003 when I was working there, I longed for a Mac. My desktop at home has also been ravaged with spyware, and is crippled right now (I have to spend a weekend rebuilding it). I had resisted because of the software costs in going to a Mac. Finally, in June, I bought a 1.67GHz 15" Powerbook G4 that came with 512MB. On Black Friday, I added another 1GB stick, so I am now with 1.5GB RAM.

I have been very happy with the Powerbook except for the RAM and slowness. The slowness went away somewhat with the new RAM, except in one GLARING spot: Web browsing.

Specifically, I was finding that surfing was slow... and slowing down my whole system. It didn't matter whether it was Safari or Firefox. I have isolated the problem - it's my Gmail. I have changed over to the basic HTML view, but that gets rid of a lot of functionality. Running Gmail on basic HTML view corrects the slowness.

On Windows, I don't have these GMail issues. It is nowhere near as slow. I just wanted to throw it out there to see if anyone had any suggestions or comments (other than the usual "get rid of your Mac" comments).