I'm guessing the computer you're running FF on has a solid-state drive; amiright ?
added: my reason for asking is that I run FF (release update channel) and I genuinely wonder whether it would be more responsive if it weren't for my slow hard drive. (in particular, I am hypothesizing that every time I visit a new page, its URL gets committed to disk.) was not trying to slam FF; please don't downvote me!
No, I'm not, actually. Just your standard, Dell-issued laptop drive.
I noticed better memory usage and general performance increases within the last few releases to the beta channel (sorry, I can't pinpoint which one it was). I started to use FF again a few months ago, and found I still needed to restart the browser at least once a day to keep things responsive (and I don't usually have more than a dozen tabs open). Then, after one of the updates, I didn't need to do that, and I didn't notice any performance degradation over the course of several days.
It's more than performance, they've also picked up must have features like opening up just closed tabs (cmd+shift+t), and cmd+9 to go to last tab, private windows (used to be all of firefox went private), quick updates.
added: my reason for asking is that I run FF (release update channel) and I genuinely wonder whether it would be more responsive if it weren't for my slow hard drive. (in particular, I am hypothesizing that every time I visit a new page, its URL gets committed to disk.) was not trying to slam FF; please don't downvote me!