If Firefox crashes, can you give me the crash report id by going to Start--type "%APPDATA%/Mozilla/Firefox/Crash Reports/Submitted. Go into the submitted folder and copy and paste the files from the crash report here.

Hello Fred.

About that RAM usage... Those 117MB aren't really that wierd for just one tab, since Firefox keeps 5 sites of the tab's history in memory, so you can go back and forth quicker and without breaking your work. So you may only have one tab open, but in truth, you may have six sites in cache. There are ways to disable this behavior, but, in my opinion, it's not very noticeable.

Now, those 1GB+ of RAM usage, that's something else. You definitely have some faulty extension or plugin. What I recommend to you is that you run Firefox in safe-mode (to disable addons and extensions) and see if its ram usage will sky rocket like that. If it doesn't (most likely), you'll have to enable one extension at a time to see which one(s) is(are) causing problems.

For reference, I have almost a hundred installed extensions, some of them are pretty heavy and are always running, and I very rarely exceed 400MB of RAM usage, and I'm ALWAYS running more than 15 tabs. So, in the end, it's only a matter of minding what you install in your Firefox, to make sure it doesn't go crazy :P

Hopefully this will help.