Forum's been a bit temperamental last few days, in terms of pages hanging. Switching between threads, alerts, inbox and the main forum page has been hit and miss, with these pages often hanging indefinitely until I hit refresh a couple of times and they suddenly kick in. My browsing elsewhere is fine.
No, I haven't swapped browsers. I'm an old stick in the mud and can't imagine using anything else. Probably worth a try just to prove a point, mind.
Try clearing your browser's cache. The cache contains web pages, scripts etc. that the browser has downloaded from e.g. WF and stored to speed up loading of the webpage in the future. Sometimes this cached data can become corrupted (probably while it's being updated with newer versions of the data), causing problems like websites freezing, constantly refreshing, features that stop working, etc. You could also try clearing the browser's cookies (at least those associated with WF). I don't think this should have an effect, but it's worth trying nonetheless.