What happend to LIGHTWEIGHT in Firefox?

Hi Firefox-developers,

in the project description of Firefox, it says "Firefox, a lightweight
browser built on the Mozilla platform". What happend with LEIGHTWEIGHT?

The reason why I'm writing this is because I've noticed a gradual but
massive deterioration of performance in Firefox over the last couple of
years. I mean, new features are kind of nice. But does the whole thing
really need to become so big and bloated that it is not usable any more?

I've just got an eeePC, installed eee Ubuntu on it, and Firefox really
sucks on it. I have to kill firefox twice a day because it completely
gets out of whack eating up all available memory and all available CPU
time. I like leightwight computers, and I also have a PC with a VIA C7,
a Qnap NAS (with an ARM CPU and 256MB memory), and an NSLU2 (also with
ARM, 32 MB memory). These devices are nice to my ears because they are
quit. They are also nice to the environment (and my electrical bill)
since they consume little electrical power.

Unfortunately, I can't really use Firefox on any of these devices :-(.
This is some kind of sad. And I don't really see why: then years ago I
used to work with a Linux notebook a lot. It was a 300 MHz Pentium and
64 MB memory, ran with a 2.2 kernel and Netscape 4.x. So, this is
roughly comparable if not much slower than the devices I'm talking about
above. And it ran Netscape well. With this system, I adopted an internet
browsing style with keeping dozens (sic!) of browser windows open at the
same time (back then with virtual desktops as there was no tabbed
browsing yet). And it used to be so fast and responsive.

Really, seriously, if it would run on current hardware, and there were
still security patches, I'd immediately switch back to Netscape 4.x. For
me, it's more important that the system is resonsive, fast, not bloated,
and runs well even on lightweight hardware.

Why can't I do that any more? Why does Firefox eat up 256MB for
displaying a blank web page? What does it do that makes it so slow?
Isn't there anything that can be done to bring back good-old Netscape
4.x's lightweightedness?

Cheers,
G.


P.S.: Mozilla isn't sponsored by hardware manufacturers to make it suck
on lighter hardware, is it?