[Discuss] Firefox vs. Chrome

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Not too long ago, I bought a Core i5 with 8GB of RAM, thinking that this
amount of horsepower thrown at the Firefox problem would make it go away.

Wrong, I was still seeing sluggish 2000ms+ response time to such simple things
as pulling up a dropdown or even echoing characters in a form.  The process
kept bloating to 2.8GB of RAM and bogging down, even with the upgrade to
version 5.0 (I use OpenSuSE for my desktop).

Today I decided I had enough and switched to Chrome.  One day into this
exercise, it appears I'm not going back, probably ever.  Chrome remains
snappy, and although it spawns separate processes for each active tab, they
all add up to about 240Mb of RAM:  less than *one tenth* the amount of RAM
gobbled by Firefox.

Has anyone else gone through this switch?  What steps could have been taken to
troubleshoot Firefox to avoid having to make this switch?  I basically
disabled all plugins, flash, Java, everything--and it still took over my whole
system.  I'm saddened by the collapse of Firefox but maybe it's just me, doing
something wrong.

-rich