Mozilla's Firefox 3.0 browser uses memory much more efficiently than its rivals, according to an independent tester who wrote a memory-monitoring utility to track usage by Firefox, Internet Explorer (IE), Flock, Opera and Safari.

For most users, Firefox doesn't use an abnormally large amount of memory. For others, however, Firefox's memory consumption is a major problem (Especilaly for people using old computers with limited memory resources), in same cases memory usage in Firefox is due some to other sources, like number of plug-ins, themes and extensions.

Numerous users of the latest version of the Firefox web browser (3.0.4 released yesterday) are reporting memory issues causing the browser to freeze up or crash. Firefox 2 was plagued with memory management issues, but users had thought Mozilla had put these behind them with Firefox 3.

It looks like the memory eating Mozilla mystery could soon be solved, now that Mozilla Corp has finally admitted that Firefox has a problem.

Finally Firefox is improving its own memory flaws and it's getting better than IE and Opera. Due to this improvements, Mozilla is aiming mobile devices.

Mozilla officials admit Firefox continues to rely on a monolithic architecture that can lead to instability and memory leaks.

One of the biggest complaints a Firefox evangelist encounters is "it doesn't act or feel like browser X." Internet Explorer users complain that Firefox doesn't look like what they're used to. Opera, Safari, and Netscape users complain that it's missing many of their favorite features. And the social networking gurus point to the powerful social networking features Flock boasts and Firefox lacks.

Sometimes Firefox can become a real memory hog, especially if you keep it running for hours and have many tabs opened. In order to make Firefox a little more responsive and save some RAM memory, here are three tweaks I bumped into over time. Notice that most of these tips only free up some memory at the expense of (usually) loading speed for web pages.

Cnet has rated Firefox 3 as the best browser out of IE 8, Safari 3 and Opera 9.5, and gives special mention to Flock!!