I rarely use the Back button. Heavy user of tabs. When hitting AW.org or any other message board, I go down each index page in turn, middle-clicking (or CTRL-LeftClick) on each thread of interest which opens the threads in new tabs. They're all loaded and ready to read. Peruse a thread/tab, close it, on to the next.
Louis, you might try Firefox again. I haven't used IE in several years other than for a few sites that require it (Windows Updates, for example). There was some instability in a few previous version of Firefox and I ran into a conflict with AVG for a while (got rid of AVG for Avast). I often have two or three Firefox windows open at the same time, and often 10 or 15+ tabs in a window and don't have any problem with crashes or freezes. Flash player occasionally crashes (running a YouTube clip for example) but Firefox itself doesn't.
I'm using Forefox 2 on the ancient WinNT system. YouTube protests that it no longer supports the old version (of both Firefox and Flash) but clips do still run. When a YouTube video clip is opened, it's "dead" but there's a link to view the page in an alternate format that works ... can't predict if YouTube may do away with the alternate at some point.