I may have to give Firefox 3 a serious look. I gave up on FF at version 1.5 and then looked at 2.x to confirm it was still a really bug, ugly, slow and bloated pile of junk.

At that time I switched over to the much more usable Camino for Mac OS. I finally gave up on that when they suffered some growing pains during the migration to 1.5.

At that time I started using Safari for the first time with the beta of version 3. I'd never really liked it before that time. It seemed quick and with a couple of tweaks did almost everything I wanted. Still no ad or pop-up blocking (the built in pop-up blocker is not usable). As it went from beta to release Apple seems to have introduced a lot more bugs and stability problems. I have a feeling they're more common or perhaps only present on the PPC architecture. I'd hate to think they're leaving the performance on PPC at this low level, but I wouldn't be surprised.

In general Leopard has been the worst version of Mac OS X I've ever used full time. Again, I suspect PPC performance and stability may be worse than Intel but I have no concrete proof. There isn't a single mainstay application shipped as part of the OS from Apple that is without problems. Mail and Safari crash or freeze weekly. Mail sometimes when just open but not even being used. Safari has been the worst however.

The current version seems to suck up more ram as you open pages but never frees any of it up. This is quickly and easily seen in Activity Monitor where opening Adobe.com will eat a huge chunk of memory. Open a few more tabs and then start closing them and none of the emory gets freed up. After a little while it's using over 500MB of real memory and over 2GB of virtual memory. All while showing only an empty google page.

Firefox in contrast frees up most of the page's memory as soon as you switch tabs. Closing the tabs seems to get you back pretty much to where you were when yhou started the application. I have yet to do testing over a long period of time, since FF was notorious for memory leaks in the past (1.0 all the way through 2)