You blame Firefox 4 to be a memory hog? Check it out first by typing about:memory in the address bar. You'll get a nice detailed report of your browsers memory usage. While it's not guaranteed you'll understand every statistic available in the report, you can at least peek at the overall memory use, and see how much it's fragmented by comparing "memory mapped" and "memory in use" numbers.

I definitely see memory usage of my browser only go up during regular use, but it's not really problematic, considering there are gobs of RAM in today's computers. And there has also been a steady improvement in memory usage efficiency, 3.0 has been the biggest hog for me, 3.5 was quite an improvement, and now 4.0 is absolutely the best of them all. Alive and kicking (though, much of the responsiveness improvement comes from better javascript engine, I suspect). It's good to know that Mozilla plans even more improvements on that front with Firefox 5, 6, 7... which they advertise will be released this year!

Adobe has just released a public beta of the next Flash Player, version 10. Mike Melanson from Adobe says:

There are plenty of nifty new features covered in the labs link. More interesting for Linux users is that we have been addressing the graphical performance issues that manifesting starting in 9r115, the version where we had to rework the graphical system due to the new XEmbed support (trying to remember what that bought us... oh yeah: context menus consistent with the desktop). The key to performance? Move away from recommended APIs and use unrecommended ones (without resorting to deprecated APIs).

The Flash Player beta is now available for various platforms including Linux. It is being made available for developers and consumers to test their content to ensure existing content plays back correctly and that there are no compatibility issues.

This beta includes 2 gzipped tarball packages for Linux: one is for the Mozilla/Firefox plugin and the other is for a GTK-based Standalone Flash Player. The plugin does not currently work in Opera browsers.