The problem is not add-ons. Let me repeat that -- THE PROBLEM IS NOT ADD-ONS. I left Firefox about a year ago, once Chrome was good enough, because my plain-vanilla Firefox, with all the tweaks to limit memory usage enabled, would still leak memory until it crashed (my laptop has 1.5GB RAM and Ubuntu; it also had a few GB of swap). Closing tabs did not help either. The only response from Mozilla was 'add-ons.' Chrome does just fine with 30+ tabs open on the same machine.
Any organization that can live in denial for years and years about the core issue with their product is going to die. Mozilla is tightly connected to the web developer community, but has a complete disconnect from the problems facing its actual users. When Firefox shipped, it was a great, light-weight alternative to Mozilla. From my point of view as a user, I haven't seen any substantial improvements since 1.0 shipped in 2004 -- spell check is nice, and given how often it crashes, restoring tabs when the browser is opened is nice -- but that's all. Otherwise, if not for security issues and web site compatibility issues, I'd be on Firefox 1.0 (which worked fine on sub-GHz machines).
Aside from that, virtually all development effort has been aimed at making a better IDE for web developers. I guess that benefits me since, ultimately, I can visit nicer web sites in Chrome.
There are a lot of users here complaining about Firefox memory usage who don't use it anymore.
Which is expected, because why would you stay if you were really bothered?
Comments from an active user, though... I've stuck with Firefox out of habit probably more than anything else, but now most of the things people (including me) were complaining about are already gone -- as of the last update, Firefox with -- sheesh, I guess I have about 100 tabs in 2 windows -- takes up under 500MB after using it all day, and in the morning it starts in a few seconds (they don't force-reload all your open tabs on startup anymore, just the active ones and I think text from the others is cached locally).
Chrome becomes unusable if I try to use it like a to-do list like this, for UI as well as memory reasons; not that I could say easily how much memory Chrome is using at the moment, with 20 tabs; the separate processes defeats seeing that easily, alas (there must a simple way to check, but I haven't tried).
It's quite stable, and even when it was still crashier (last year?) it's been years since I've actually lost my tabs after a crash; they've always been auto-recovered (and it has that nice prompt to let me close the ones I think may be causing trouble before relaunching).
Given different usage patterns, etc., I have no idea if people trying the actual, current FF will want to go back -- but for anyone who left more than a few months ago (especially if you left due to memory footprint) I'd suggest trying it again sometime.
[And I like the more frequent releases, personally -- I always hated the slow release cycle, and feel like they're starting to get into the swing of it now -- but I obviously don't speak for the crowd on this one...]
Any organization that can live in denial for years and years about the core issue with their product is going to die. Mozilla is tightly connected to the web developer community, but has a complete disconnect from the problems facing its actual users. When Firefox shipped, it was a great, light-weight alternative to Mozilla. From my point of view as a user, I haven't seen any substantial improvements since 1.0 shipped in 2004 -- spell check is nice, and given how often it crashes, restoring tabs when the browser is opened is nice -- but that's all. Otherwise, if not for security issues and web site compatibility issues, I'd be on Firefox 1.0 (which worked fine on sub-GHz machines).
Aside from that, virtually all development effort has been aimed at making a better IDE for web developers. I guess that benefits me since, ultimately, I can visit nicer web sites in Chrome.