Firefox constantly hangs and freezes; uses 100% CPU during the freeze.

Question

Almost spontaneously, Firefox would freeze and become unresponsive. During this time, every Firefox window is whited-out and do not respond to any input, and the Firefox process uses up 100% CPU. All active content running at the time of the freeze, if any, continue to function as normal (Videos continue to play, web applications providing audio notifications send them as normal, although any visuals are now not visible as the browser windows are frozen. The sound continues uninterrupted, however.)
Freezing may occur at any point. Even when the user does not interact with Firefox, it may still freeze. Freezing persists with all addons and plugins disabled.
The freeze would last between a few seconds to a minute, and subsequent to the freeze, Firefox always resumes responding as if nothing had happened. While it does not result in significant losses, the freezing is extremely inconvenient and may occur as frequently as once every ten minutes.
The freezing symptom is universal across all versions of firefox between 5 and 8.0a2.

Answer 1

There are at least four similar topics here about this problem and I have clicked the button that I too have the problem on each and every one of them.
This is the first time in years that Firefox has given me a serious enough problem to render it unusable.