The day has finally come. Will all my experience I still never thought it would actually happen. Yes, sad to say - Firefox is bloated. Or at least is a victim of poor RAM management.

Today I was working on a couple Photoshop Files (500mb or so of system resources) when I did my annual check to see if it was time to shut down PS CS2 and start it up again to free up all that "History" memory and program cache data. You see, after a opening a couple of files, saving, and editing - Photoshop tends to reach into the 1-2GB used RAM range and soon after the file system virtual memory! It is at that point that I shut it down to reclaim my PC from the effects of poor RAM management.

However, today I was looking at the windows task manager when I saw something I have never seen. Firefox was actually using over 500,000kb of RAM! In addition, it was also using +40% of my AMD Athlon X2 +4200 CPU! Wow, I never saw that with IE (IE always crashed before then).

Now, I only had like 10 tabs open. Sure I had been browsing on and off for several hours, but 500MB? It isn't like I was playing Flash games, watching movies, or browsing super Javascript enabled sites.

So what happened to my beloved FF? Is it time to switch to Flock? Is the sky falling? Am I dead!?