Firefox on Windows 7, 32-bit, is leading me to dabble in alternate browsers again.
It's actually getting to be so aggravating that I would actually consider reinstalling Internet Explorer.
I hibernate my system each day when I leave for work, simply because I'm gone for up to 12 hours a day. It makes no sense to leave a machine with a 300w power supply on for half a day when I can't use it. Important-to-me stuff that I can't have shut off was relegated to a 30w machine that sits in the living room.
After a couple of days of such behavior, Firefox has blimped up to 500 MB of memory in use, and I only have about 12 tabs open, usually to image intense pages, and not flash!
I tend to watch a couple of stupid vids here and there, watch someone draw through one of the streaming video sites, check email, and peruse a couple of sites with artistic communities of varying skill levels and styles. Other than that, I'm not doing much in the browser itself.
The fact that closing the browser takes minutes, instead of seconds, is already an annoyance. Reopening is just as bad, since it's reopening the tabs I had loaded earlier.
I don't have toolbars loaded. I only use a few plugins, of which the notorious Adobe Cra^WFlash is one (blip.fm, youtu.be need them for my usage).
My addons use is relatively minimal, compared to the number of addons there are.
Every few months, because it just drives me insane, I uninstall the current version of Firefox, nuke the profile, and just run a clean install. I get some speed back.
I run vacuumplaces extension regularly to try to keep it stable... but this is the most high maintenance, buggy piece of junk I've ever run.
Sadly, because of a few specific things I need that I haven't found out how to replicate in another browser, I'm stuck with Firefox.
(Give me a working alternative to DownThemAll!, and I might be able to survive.)