Firefox 4

ffox blows. It's starting to feel like an android phone bloated with crapware. the fox takes up tons of memory. chokes on the easiest of loads. takes years to open and at this point is just a crappy hybrid of chrome and safari. I used to love it but now the benefits are all gone. I'll stick with safari and use ffox and minimally as possible for when safari isn't supported.

 

Your problem may be Flash and other scripting. I'm not joking, snarking or hating: my Firefox and Safari both became significantly more stable when I removed Flash. I keep Chrome around because it has an integrated and sandboxed Flash interpreter, so I can pull it up when needed.

I run Firefox with NoScript, switching to one of the other browsers when scripting is needed. And Flash is gone from my machine, save for the version integrated into Chrome.

Instructions for removing Flash: http://daringfireball.net/2010/11/flash_free_and_cheating_with_google_chrome

I use FF4 more than the other two browsers combined. It is considerably (and I mean considerably) more stable when lots and lots of tabs and windows are open. This is the case on Windows, too, incidentally.

Since I'm a pack-rat for tabs, that's a key functionality. But other aspects of FF4 are superior, too, IMHO:

• Copying from web pages into a Gmail mail-composition form is much cleaner
• Cursor behavior is more predictable
• The designers' choices for focus when opening a new tab or window are just a little better thought-out
• It tends to be stable over days and days.
• I trust its privacy provisions and behaviors much more than I do Chrome.

Eventually, through many openings and closings of my MacBook Pro and with dozens of tabs open, FF4 may become unstable or use too much CPU after several days of usage. Okay: quit, wait for it to unload fully, then re-open. It'll load all your pages again. Even with that glitch (which is significantly mitigated by using NoScript) it holds up better than Safari or Chrome with dozens of tabs open. Both of the other browsers will summarily quit if too many tabs are in use. To keep things lively, it's never quite clear when you're approaching "too many," too.

Between its comparative solidity (when NoScript'd) and superior user interface, FireFox is the browser I turn to most.

 

Try camino. It uses less RAM than any other popular browser, at least in my experience.

 

+1 for everything above, especially NoScript. And, I always block Flash and only occasionally enable it. Trust me, every browser works better without Flash

I sometimes have over 100 tabs, and, FF 4.0.1 keeps on working -- in 64-bits. I do note that I have 4 GB memory, and, after 3-4 days and 100+ tabs, (private) memory usage grows to ~1 GB. Obviously, this would be a problem on a 1, or even 2 GB machine. With 3-4 GB, no problem.

 

I tried FF4 but since it starts up the nvidia card on my MBP I downgraded to 3.6.17 which only uses the integrated intel card.

 

I use gfxCardStatus to decide myself which graphics card is used.
http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus

--
Luke

 

FF4 was running awesome for me. I had one memory leak on the first day (used 1.1 GB out of my 1.5GB) but it has been running awesome since. And I will add, a LOT better than FF 3.6 (it's faster and doesn't crash/slow down to a crawl after several days of not restarting it).

However, I have fortunately moved on... to the Firefox 5 Beta!