I opened up a bunch of tabs (9 in total) in firefox 22.0 which came to a total of 398MB memory usage. I opened the SAME tabs in chrome and it came to 592MB. I opened the SAME tabs in IE10 and it was 354MB. I guess firefox is actually pretty good. Besides there are a stack of plugins that have been around for a long time that are not being integrated and probably never will. In any case IE10+ looks like a good option for you.

The uptake rate has been far from dismal... it was low when the first trial started in Tasmania for obvious reasons (most people there don't know what the internet is lol). Since then takeup has been pretty good. There are even towns throwing money at NBN Co. to go to them first or add them to the fibre build list if they weren't on it. Furthermore NBN Co. expected (and financed for) the majority of people to sign up to the 12Mbps plans, but the majority have signed up to the 50Mbps plans. Also If you read the NBN Co. website you will find that the $37 billion figure is not a blow out at all but less than the original costed value $43b. http://www.nbn.gov.au/2012/04/27/how-much-will-the-nbn-rollout-cost/ The opposition was claiming a while ago that it will blow out to $50m but that was just them trying political scare tactics and the cost blow out issue has been put to rest for some time.