I tend to generate 12-20 tabs very easily when I'm researching a topic and then I can leave them open for a good while as I get around to reading them all. I can end up with 100 plus tabs open easily. In Safari this leads to heavy memory usage and on my 2GB PowerBook G4 this lead to 2 or more Gig of swap space and a basically unusable machine. Seconds of waiting between actions, at times. All cured by either quiting Safari and letting the VM recover or a restart. So, I decided to finally switch to Firefox.
I know it has taken me ages, but I'd got taken by Saft and saving my open tabs. Session Saver did this for Firefox 1.5 and it is now a slightly hidden feature on Firefox 2. A dropdown is not a good place to hide additional functionality. It is on the first tab in preferences, but looks like a drop down that controls the Home Page behaviour. So the other reason to move to Firefox, the lovely add-ons eg Operator and Tails which highlight microformats.
Firefox is not without its faults, it seems to be more CPU bound than Safari was, so my machine has a lower VM usage, 1 gig typically, but the CPU load sits about 2 most of the time. It makes my envious of Lucy's new MacBook.
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