I routinely leave my browser open for days on end and simply cycle through tabs, closing and opening new ones as needed, with usually ~10 open at a given time. I, too, noticed that firefox was eating up about half a gig of ram even when it wasn't doing anything, didn't have any youtube tabs open, etc. It got to the point where I would have to close firefox and restart after a day or two. Chrome fixed that. Now, I just use firefox with the modify headers extension to watch domain-specific video, and have no plans to go back.
Now, maybe I'm to blame here, using the nightly build of chromium, but webkit is a walking memory leak. Just for a comparison, I have the same amount of tabs on firefox and chromium and firefox is using 500mb of ram, while chromium is using 3.5 GIGABYTES. And I'm not even using it much.
But really, the problem is easily reproducible. Just open whatever webkit based browser you want, and keep reloading the same moderately big page. Ram goes up, never to return. That works with a trivial program that embeds webkit via gtk, too.
Or you can just look at the commits on webkit: a couple of leaks fixes every week.
They're not confined to a single tab for me. It seems like child tabs go in the parent process, for example, so I usually get 2-5 tabs crashing at once.
I also get more crashes with Chrome than I used to get with Firefox, but maybe I'm just opening more tabs.
I left Firefox for Safari because Safari was prettier, faster and used less memory.
Lately, I'm close to leaving Safari for Chrome because it's faster, uses less memory and crashes less (in fact, it's never crashed so far, vs 100's of times total probably with Safari.) Unfortunately, Chrome is a little uglier, and has certain less user conveniences. So it's not an easy jump to make.
You think Chrome is ugly and inconvenient? I think it's the best looking browser out there, and the omnibox is fantastic. The only thing I don't like about Chrome on OSX is some flash players don't play nice with it.
