Comment 11 for bug 565892

I have the exact same problem. Firefox had timeouts and extremely long hangs loading pages. I did not test other GUI apps. However, I could use the terminal to run updates (apt-get).

By chance, I found this behavior was linked to wireless security. Once I removed all my wireless security, web browsing worked normally. I tried using both WEP 128 bit encryption, and WPA2. I had the same issue both times, pages (namely ubuntu.com) would not load or would hang somewhere along the way.

PERHAPS THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR MIGHT KNOW A BETTER PACKAGE HINT, AS I AM NOT TECH SAVVY ENOUGH TO
SUGGEST THE CORRECT ONE.

Excerpt from my lspci -vnn output:

09:04.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Atheros Communications Inc. AR2413 802.11bg NIC [168c:001a] (rev 01)
 Subsystem: Askey Computer Corp. Device [144f:7094]
 Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 168, IRQ 22
 Memory at c0110000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
 Capabilities: <access denied>
 Kernel driver in use: ath5k
 Kernel modules: ath5k