1. Quartz used to keep the bitmap of every window in RAM. It plays more conservation tricks than it used to (e.g., compressing the bitmaps), but AIUI this is still basically true.
2. Firefox leaks a lot of RAM. My primary workload on my 1 GB PowerBook G4 is Firefox, which regularly starts swapping after it's been running for a couple weeks. (My regular tab load is ~50 open tabs.) After a month, it's swapping so badly it's hardly usable. Given that I hate shutting down Firefox (I use SessionSaver but don't trust it hugely), 1 GB isn't really sufficient. YMMV.
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1. Quartz used to keep the bitmap of every window in RAM. It plays more conservation tricks than it used to (e.g., compressing the bitmaps), but AIUI this is still basically true.
2. Firefox leaks a lot of RAM. My primary workload on my 1 GB PowerBook G4 is Firefox, which regularly starts swapping after it's been running for a couple weeks. (My regular tab load is ~50 open tabs.) After a month, it's swapping so badly it's hardly usable. Given that I hate shutting down Firefox (I use SessionSaver but don't trust it hugely), 1 GB isn't really sufficient. YMMV.