I really do not find Firefox 3 to be a memory hog at all. I find it to consume much less memory than Chrome running multiple tabs over a prolonged period of time. I have caught Chrome running way out of control with memory usage and nearly maxing out my page file. My usage generally has Firefox using between 300MB and 500MB or RAM depending on what I have open. The same usage on Chrome is tricky to track total memory usage, but I can get a rough idea of how much memory it was using when I quit Chrome and compare the available memory to how much memory was being used while Chrome was running.
What browser do you consider not to be a memory hog?
I used to be a die-hard firefox user and I also used to write extensions for it for fun and professionally as well. I always say it's the only browser that I've read the source code for.(well, some of it at least)
The thing that bugged me with FF3 was that it never seemed to reclaim the memory that the tabs were using after being closed. I noticed that when you have say >20 tabs open. I often had to save my tabs and kill FF so that it doesn't bog down my system.
Now I'm using chrome which still is not perfect especially when you have say gmail and gmaps open and several other tabs. But killing the tabs does seem to make the app snappier again.
What platform do you run? I am on Linux x86_64 and Fx4b7 takes almost 10% of my RAM and ~20-30% CPU with two tabs open. With the same tabs open in Chromium, I get 2.7% RAM usage and 0-5% CPU usage. Maybe Fx has been really optimizing for Windows lately, but the performance on Linux x86_64 is not very satisfactory.
I am on OS X (10.6.5). I did not see FF4 CPU usage anything near what you are seeing. My CPU is ~2-3% with 6 tabs open (2 being Gmail). RAM usage is steady after a day of using the same browser process.
I really do not find Firefox 3 to be a memory hog at all. I find it to consume much less memory than Chrome running multiple tabs over a prolonged period of time. I have caught Chrome running way out of control with memory usage and nearly maxing out my page file. My usage generally has Firefox using between 300MB and 500MB or RAM depending on what I have open. The same usage on Chrome is tricky to track total memory usage, but I can get a rough idea of how much memory it was using when I quit Chrome and compare the available memory to how much memory was being used while Chrome was running.
What browser do you consider not to be a memory hog?