3 (sic, three) FPS here-- Linux Mint 12 amd64, Firefox 9.0.1, nvidia Go 7300 with 512MB RAM and 4GB system RAM. Also only about 60% of the frame is visible at a time on my 1280x800 display.
webgl.disabled is false by default. I switched the force-enabled on but it dodn't make any noticeable difference.
I should have mentioned I'm using the nouveau driver. I get slightly better performance with the proprietary nvidia driver. In my experience most games will either work about as well with nouveau or not at all.
GLX gears is a pretty unreliable benchmark: I've gotten anywhere from 300 to 600 FPS on this machine at different times. I usually get around 90 FPS when playing fairly recent games like Modern Warfare 2 (on windows). Perhaps you meant glxinfo, which reports whether direct rendering is enabled (and it is).
If webgl.disabled is true set this to false. If that doesn't help you could try forcing it to be enabled.
Also, do you have the most up to date graphics drivers? This could be another thing to consider.