Recently, many sites like Genbeta echoed the news that a Mozilla developer found a solution to make Firefox consume fewer resources on our GNU/Linux system.
The blame for Firefox 's excessive memory consumption has always been placed on the JavaScript engine , which mismanaged memory, leaving behind chunks of data that couldn't be cleared and accumulated with each open tab. This will be corrected starting with version 7 of the browser, which you can try out by downloading it from this link.
But I always like to go further and I downloaded the latest available version of Firefox (aka Nightly) which currently has the number 8.0a1.
From the moment we launch the browser, we can see that it's much faster. Furthermore, Firefox joins the club of browsers that hide the "http" and highlight the domain in the address bar. Memory usage remains slightly above 100MB when we have more than one tab open and loading, but it quickly decreases as we close tabs or the site has fully loaded.
The interface is unchanged and remains similar to previous versions. So far, Firefox hasn't been unstable at all, nor has it crashed on me even while playing Flash videos, so I recommend using it (always at your own risk).
Links: Download Firefox 8.0a1 | Other versions in development.