1) Yes, I know, that's how long Firefox has been going down the wrong path, performance-wise. They've only recently seemed to kinda start addressing that ("now we're as good as Chrome, finally!" OK but Chrome is also bad, so....)

2) I'd prefer software just, you know, not be bad. Safari, for all its problems, demonstrates that there's nothing inherent in a modern desktop web browser that requires it to be grossly inconsiderate of your system resources.

The point is that Firefox 2 became too bloated for its time and it never felt like it got debloated after that even things progressed.

I remember these days clearly because Firefox 1 was very fast and it displaced Mozilla (what was later called "Mozilla Suite") as the main browser for the Mozilla Foundation exactly because of that performance benefit. However Firefox 2 not only ended up becoming much slower but Mozilla Suite actually became faster and ended up being faster than Firefox despite providing not only a browser, but also a mail client, news client, WYSIWYG editor, IRC client, etc - ie an integrated "internet client".

At the time i liked Mozilla more than Firefox so i was bitter about it and how it was eventually abandoned by Mozilla Foundation (it became Seamonkey, sure, but that is another story).

I'm still unsure why certain websites result in browser processes using up substantial resources in terms of CPU time or system memory. I typically will search for "Web Content" processes in top and kill the ones that are taking more than a certain percent of resident memory or using more than 20% CPU time just to keep the computer usable.

That's not a problem I recall encountering in the days of Firefox 2.0.