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I gave up on Firefox a year or two back because of performance concerns - not raw speed but ram consumption (leading to thrashing when tabbing between ram-intensive processes) and its poor single-threaded freezing problems. Nice to hear that FF is getting better and I'll be able to go back to it - its extension community is far better than Chrome's, and Firebug is without peer.

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Frankly I think Firefox performs a lot better than Chrome for memory usage now. After a few days of having Chrome open it's usually using between 3 and 6GB of RAM (Usually Facebook is using a gigabyte so killing that tab frees up a lot) and this is with <50 tabs open. Friends who use Firefox end up with ~1GB of RAM usage in a similar timeframe.

It's funny, I was using Chrome for about a month (when they finally released a Linux version) but was forced back to Firefox mainly because of massive memory consumption (because I keep a lot of open tabs). The other problem I had with it was lack of AdBlock Plus back then - without it the web is unusable.

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