That is not complex rendering by any means. Having the ability to customise hardly does anything resource wise, instead of using xyz.gif for the toolbars it uses abc.gif. Add half a second because it has to grab the alexa rank for the site being visited. I rarely visit sites where it has to load anything other than HTML, CSS, images, and poorly written JS; so it's not like its caching a 100mb youtube video for me or anything. Considering other browsers run fine on Windows that makes it a FF thing.
Just as I thought. You don't know the half of it and only assume it's that simple. Are you aware the javascript engine is running to do that plus XML parsing? Again, you are only looking at half the picture and don't understand what is going on in the background when you visit a page. You miss the point. If FF runs in 180 Mb on *nix but 500Mb on Windows, but it's essentially the same software, guess what the only difference is?
I update firefox using the Check for updates menu option under the Help menu. and it usually works just fine.
Simple, all very simple. It doesn't require much processing power at all, even though the backend is "complex". How many MB of memory is needed to do anything FF does? Very little. I have 8 tabs open, FF is using 398mb of memory... Opera has 5 things, its 38mb. It's not like I'm the only one.. Does it mean I'll stop using FF? Course not, I have 4GB of RAM plus page file that windows loves to use even when there's a ton of free RAM, I'll live... it's just a pain that it uses so much.
YES i agree... esp the "Awesome Bar" because every link i type on a daily basis almost never shows up. And links to websites i have not been to in years always seem to show up on this "Not So Awesome Bar" Without Addons Firefox is not bad on memory resources. However it makes me wonder just how good some of these plugins are with memory leaks.