Totally unrelated, check GOGPM

Last I checked Firefox was ahead of the competition, and by a long shot. Unfortunately, that was a while back, so I'm not sure how that's changed. Firefox rarely uses more than 250mb out of my 4gb of RAM. Ever since they fixed that horrible memory leak that existed in the 2.x branch they've been doing well.

At that time Chrome was easily the worst of the browsers measured.

Depends on your usecase; I usually get Firefox 4 to around 400+ MB of RAM but that's with a heck of a lot of tabs open (around 60) and some of them filled with flash and other intensive things.

If I try to do the same with Chrome it crashes at around 30 tabs (not to mention that i can't see the titles of the tabs anymore).

I haven't tried this yet with IE9 but I guess it would behave nicely. It seems that so far it uses the least amount of memory in light use when compared to FF or Chrome.

That's true, I tend to have a moderate number of tabs open at any given time and I'm probably more similar to normal people. But, what you're describing isn't surprising, one of the side effects of creating an entirely new browser process for each tab is that you're going to waste a lot of memory on a normal operational basis.

It'll be interesting to see how much memory Firefox uses when they finish the process of creating separate processes for tabs, since they're planning to limit that primarily to the rendering and specifics of the page.

Well, they started it with Electrolysis in 2009 but it hasn't progressed that fast; it only managed to isolate browser plugins like Flash. Mozilla VP Jay Sullivan said that tab isolation probably won't be ready for Firefox 5 and will likely take a few cycles to get right.

Pretty much this. I don't need this pig except for Javascript debugging and NoScript. Get NoScript on anything else and I'll switch everything over but development immediately.

I was using the Betas and RCs... but then IE9 came out. And Firefox got unpinned from my Taskbar.

Afaik:
Firefox by default has no track blocking features, no process / tab isolation, no sandboxing, no regular and private browsing at the same time.

One of the most iritating things, if I close the browser while downloading something, keeping the download window open, and I open a tab, the download starts again. That's just freaking stupid.

Thankyou, It's a fair point, but I know my options. It's frustrating that the previous UI fulfilled my requirements, and the new one is not as good. Opera, I may look at one day, but I'm more keen for the trend to change than one implementation.

It's becoming far more frustrating that they have swapped around the context menu on links so that "open in window" and "open in tab" are the other way around!. I really am having trouble with that, I use that a lot.

To each their own... :) I just wanted to ask, why you never used the Ctrl-Tab shortcut?
Myself, I enjoy playing and tweaking new concepts, so I fell in love with Chrome (and Win 7)

Why don't you just use another homepage? Or you can always point it to about:blank

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but won't people still be able to see that page if they reset it? I may be wrong as I haven't touched Chrome for a couple of years.

Anyway I'm fine with the layout, but like Michael, the changing of the status bar irks me. It just displays what the page is loading, but doesn't show me the progress. Is there any way to customize this?

-edit- Well, here's my answer.

It still memory leaks like a champ. I can get it over a gig of RAM usage in around 3 days.

I do like Firefox but I am not happy with the unnecessary changes I am seeing / not seeing in ver 4. Change for the sake of change . . . sorta the MS ribbon syndrome. I have only been running it for an hour but I can't seem to find any options to put it back the way I want it to be.

Thanks for this, one problem eliminated . . . =)

It does seem to be running significantly better on my old machine. cpu hasn't gone apeshit yet like it use to occassionally do under 3. It seems much faster. Plus noscript still works. Not sure how I feel about the cosmetic changes yet. I don't automatically hate them, which is somewhat surprising see-ing that all my machines including my Vista is set to the windows-95 classic look and feel.

For the tab haters - I use to hate tabs and then one day I stopped hating ... it was weird.