Ok, I updated the last paragraph – Peter claims some fixed are going to be in Firefox 3, but I don’t think there is any significant change in Firefox 3 beta (see also http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11/19/firefox-3-beta-1/ ) and we don’t know anything about the release (I’m pretty sure Firefox would not get any major memory management work otherwise they’re not going to make the roadmap).

One problem I have with the opinions of Firefox developers is that they tend to characterize Firefox memory issues as insignificant (in the first link in your comment – [About larger caches:] It worked great but caused us to use a bit more memory), while at the same time characterizing fixes that result in small improvement to the memory problems as huge fixes that have a lot of impact.

I hope that version 3 will see a lot of improvement – especially for the many tabs use case, but as I don’t think that Peter’s use case of 20 tabs is large – I regularly have 20 tabs or more open in the browser (yay session manager!) and my girlfriend sometimes has over a hundred tabs at the same time – I also don’t think that the Firefox team would succeed in doing what they failed miserably at for the last 5 years: delivering solutions to users needs.