For #2, try Vacuum Places Improved:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vacuum-places...
It gives you a button to defragment your Places database, which might greatly speed up your awesomebar. You can also set it to run automatically at startup after the browser has been restarted X times (by default X is 50, and I'm not sure that I restart Firefox 50 times in a year, so you may want to reduce this).
FYI, firefox does this automatically (although doubtless the exact behavior has changed since 2009).
Thanks! I'm trying it right now.
As I mentioned, I only opened a single page. This page had no JavaScript. I only loaded it once. I only have Firebug, 1password and xmarks installed. But it doesn't matter, Firefox is a slow memory hog, it has been since 1.5.
Wrt CPU: are you sure you didn't have flash videos playing in a few of the tabs? :)
Btw, in my limited experience the meme that Chrome uses less memory is false. It just splits it across many processes (and IIRC this was shown recently using graphs and everything) making it harder to infer in something like Windows Task Manager.
Except wrt startup time, Firefox feels as fast (or faster) than Chrome.
Firefox needs to work on two things:
1. Raw startup time
2. speed up loading of awesomebar info after startup: even a simple-minded thing like write out the entire file under a new name every few days will probably defragment the file. it seems like that file gets heavily fragmented leading to long delays to load it. I might be wrong about the root cause.
YMMV.