So not too long back, I downloaded Firefox 5 after being prompted to do so.  Rather than having significant releases as I was used to, it turns out Mozilla is following along the business model of what seems all the other browser developers, and developing lots of smaller releases.

After downloading Firefox 5, I really noticed nothing had changed.  The memory being used was the same (if not a little higher), the pages all loaded at the same speed, etc.  I was informed by my good friend Trasharmdsister12 that some people were already running Firefox 6, and even Firefox 7.  I didn't really think about it much at first, but finally decided to check it out.

Turns out that Mozilla themselves offer Firefox 6 Beta and Firefox 7 Aurora for any and all who want to try them out.  Knowing that installing one of these won't write over my current Firefox 5, I decided I might as well jump all the way to Firefox 7.  If I didn't like it, and it wasn't quite stable enough, I could either try Firefox 6, or just stay on Firefox 5.

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Total memory consumption has dropped CONSIDERABLY.

Firefox 5 with 5 selected tabs opened used ~238 mb of memory

Firefox 7 with the same 5 tabs opened used ~147 mb of memory

This is a drop of over 38%!!!

I have also noticed a pretty healthy speed boost in regards to how fast pages load.

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Looking at the changelogs on Mozillas website, it would seem that the memory consumption and speed boosts are a part of Firefox 7, not Firefox 6.

Anybody else who is interested in downloading either Firefox 6 or 7 can go to the following address:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel/

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UPDATE:

So I ran the Sunspider 0.9.1 Javascript Benchmark Test

I would paste the links to see the results, but they are extremely long.

Firefox 5 Overall Result was 362.6ms (+/- 1.6%), and the Firefox 7 Overall Result was 342.1ms (+/- 1.7%).  While it is not a massive improvement for Javascript speeds, it is ~5% faster.

For reference, IE9 is 363.3ms (+/-1.8%)

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Next, I found a Peacekeeper Benchmark Test, which was much more thorough than the Javascript test.

Firefox 7 Results:

Rendering: 2785

Social Networking: 4156

Complex Graphics: 6743

Data: 6671

DOM Operations: 3946

Text Parsing: 6186

Overall Score: 4519

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Firefox 5 Results:

Rendering: 3505

Social Networking: 2721

Complex Graphics: 11019

Data: 5942

DOM Operations: 2764

Text Parsing: 5011

Overall Score: 3792

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IE9 Results:

Rendering: 4887

Social Networking: 2295

Complex Graphics: 10457

Data: 9394

DOM Operations: 2105

Text Parsing: 8962

Overall Score: 4567

IE9 actually scored the highest between FF5, FF7, and IE9.

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It has to be taken into effect that this is just an Alpha version of the browser, and not the finalized version.  That being the case, out of the 6 areas, Rendering has decreased quite a bit, as well as Complex Graphics going down a LOT.  Due to "Canvas" not being included in all major browsers at the moment, the Complex Graphics is not figured into the overall score.

The fact that Firefox 7 uses Azure Direct2d for Canvas instead of Cairo, I am quite baffled that it is scoring almost 50% lower for complex graphics.  I'm hoping they get whatever is going on with this fixed in the near future, so I can take full advantage of everything new in Firefox 7.

I'm also not quite sure why Rendering has decreased.  I'll make sure to leave feedback in regards to this, hopefully they see it.