OStatic

First of all, where i am standing:

Intel Celeron M 420 @ 1.60 GHz, 448 MB RAM, XP Professional SP2. That's the baby, not very swanky anymore, but she gets the job done.

I have about a week ago update to FF3 and started experiencing the "slowness" issues that were noted in some of the other threads that i looked at. "Slowness" in my case manifested itself by FF3 starting to hog *massive* amounts of RAM memory. I am a fairly intensive surfer, (i.e. i read a lot of blogs and newspapers, use the damned facebook, etc.), so i am used to seeing lots of graphics and java stuff and having 10 tabs or more open on my computer, but the old FF2 hardly broke a sweat and soldiered on at around 100 megs.

FF3 came along and my count jumped even threefold, completely slowing down the entire system (you do the math, 300megs plus at 440 megs, and that's only the browser here), and then it would unceremoniously crash. I unceremoniously then downloaded Opera 9.5, which i had used in the past, only to discover that it started behaving pretty much the same way. I have since uninstalled Opera and FF3 and, using my IE5 from back-in-the-day, got myself FF2 again and did a big system restore to two weeks ago, to before the time when any of this happened. And still my issues persist: with only about 5 tabs open i get readings in the 300s and freeze-ups.

Why is this?