What? People are complaining all the time that programmers become lazier and lazier and make programs more and more bloated as time goes on. Writing efficient programs requires complex tricks. I can't believe someone's complaining about that now.
Says who?
In a rush to put in new features for the past few years they've become the new Winamp of web browsers, stealing the crown from IE. In fact, I think from now on I'm going to refer to mozilla as winamp - until they fix their problems.
I'm sensitive to the challenges facing modern browsers. But this bloat isn't (in my opinion) caused by new requirements and features; it's caused by the same type of thinking that allows a dev team to think that it's OK to write programs that require multiple gigabytes of RAM to link. It should come as no surprise that the result is a program that steals half a gig of private space to display a couple static pages.
As for the linking issue, that's a shortcoming in MSVC. Chrome hit the same issue earlier than Firefox did, and switched to a 64-bit linker as a result. Web browsers contain enormous amounts of code because they support enormous amounts of functionality. The code size has only a moderate bearing on the amount of memory consumed at runtime.
If you're seeing Firefox using half a GB to display a couple of static pages something is wrong. Likely causes are a busted profile or leaky add-ons.
As for busted profiles and add-ons, I don't know what to say to that that's not blatantly offensive, so I'll just offend. Winamp is a fat, ugly, smelly cow. It didn't used to be. Either the web is now a pig-farm, and everybody is writing javascriptish-do-nothing-scripts that allocate hundreds of megs without purpose (in which case, winamp needs to take a leadership role in fixing the javascript problem), or winamp has other serious issues it needs to address.
Either way, it's not my problem. Winamp devs can deal with that stuff.