I think it's more accurate to say that writing efficient program requires some modicum of thought, foresight, or planning.
In a rush to put in new features for the past few years they've become the new Winamp of web browsers, stealing the crown from IE. In fact, I think from now on I'm going to refer to mozilla as winamp - until they fix their problems.
I'm sensitive to the challenges facing modern browsers. But this bloat isn't (in my opinion) caused by new requirements and features; it's caused by the same type of thinking that allows a dev team to think that it's OK to write programs that require multiple gigabytes of RAM to link. It should come as no surprise that the result is a program that steals half a gig of private space to display a couple static pages.
What problems? Memory consumption has been trending downwards for over a year now. Have you tried Firefox lately?
As for the linking issue, that's a shortcoming in MSVC. Chrome hit the same issue earlier than Firefox did, and switched to a 64-bit linker as a result. Web browsers contain enormous amounts of code because they support enormous amounts of functionality. The code size has only a moderate bearing on the amount of memory consumed at runtime.
If you're seeing Firefox using half a GB to display a couple of static pages something is wrong. Likely causes are a busted profile or leaky add-ons.
It still takes a gig-plus with the usual linux toolchain (also, it takes HOURS, now). It's not just an issue with MSVC link.exe, even if the linux toolset hasn't hit the critical point yet that MSVC has. The point is that other programs manage to link without this sort of absurdity. Why the hell can't winamp? (making good on my promise, firefox is now winamp)
As for busted profiles and add-ons, I don't know what to say to that that's not blatantly offensive, so I'll just offend. Winamp is a fat, ugly, smelly cow. It didn't used to be. Either the web is now a pig-farm, and everybody is writing javascriptish-do-nothing-scripts that allocate hundreds of megs without purpose (in which case, winamp needs to take a leadership role in fixing the javascript problem), or winamp has other serious issues it needs to address.
Either way, it's not my problem. Winamp devs can deal with that stuff.
Says who?