FF has been open for 5 days and I have 44 tabs open and it's consuming 100MB.
This is rather surprising, actually. I recently trimmed off a few addons... they might have been causing some memory leaks.
We have to admit that FF is becoming 'Bloated' day by day
It's easy to say a program is bloated but really half the people that say it don't know what they are saying and nary prove the "bloatedness". They have this concept that the "feeling" they get from using the program is some sort of empirical evidence that the application is slower.
In an interesting sidebar: a program can actually take 5 seconds longer to load then another program, and people will think it's blazingly faster.
Program A takes 15 seconds to load. During the time it loads, the cursor is an hourglass/waiting cursor, but there is no other visual indication the application is starting.
Program B takes 20 Seconds to load, but during this time it displays a splash screen with things such as version, a tip, and perhaps a progress bar.
Guess which one wins in a "bloated" contest? the first one is called "bloated" and "slow" and yet it takes 25% longer to start, and oftentimes people might try to start it again, resulting in two instances.
"bloat" for most people is purely a perception. I'm sorry but perceptions differ between different people and no one perception is ever <righter> then any other. If you perceive that Chrome is faster or that firefox is bloated then go right ahead, but bear in mind that your perceptions are not evidence of anything.