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Firefox On Linux Gets Faster Builds — To Be Fast As Windows
dkd903 writes "Mozilla's Mike Hommey has announced on his blog that his team at Mozilla has finally managed to get the Linux builds of Firefox to use GCC 4.5 with aggressive optimization and profile guided optimization enabled. All this simply means that we can now expect a faster and less sluggish Firefox browser on Linux (both 32 bit and 64 bit systems)."
AdBlock and Firebug are both know to cause memory problems in some cases. I believe this will, at least in part, be fixed in Firefox 4.0.1 - which was launched the other day I think (maybe you already updated to it). But even so, they are good first suspects. Firefox lets addons modify a lot of internal things, which makes useful addons like AdBlock and Firebug possible, but also gives them the opportunity to (easily) create memory leaks.
In general, though, my best suggestion would be to see how things are without *any* plugins or addons. Simplest way is to create a new profile, and disable plugins and addons in it. Then browse for a while and see how things are. Odds are, you won't see strange memory behavior, and then the question is, which addon or plugin it is, and you can reenable them one by one til you find the guilty one.
Long-term, most addons will probably become Jetpack addons, which is a model similar to Chrome's. That kind of addon is more limited in what it can do, but also unable to cause memory leaks. Aside from that, we are moving to a one process per tab model, also like Chrome, will will help narrow down which page is responsible for large amounts of memory being used, when that happens. In the short term, though, problems like yours are almost always caused by addons or plugins, and I apologize for the hassle, the best thing to do is to find which it is, as I said earlier.