Web Browsing on my Mini

As always with computers I want things to be snappy. Unfortunately, snappy does not go hand in hand with a Mac Mini. While a very economical computer it is also slower than mud. I wish Apple would grow up and play with others so I can get fast and cheap hardware with OS X.
The point is, Safari is great but GMail does not work well in it(causes memory leaks). This means at any given moment I need at least w different browsers open, typically this has been Safari and Firefox. Unfortunately they are both big fat ugly memory pigs that quickly lead my Mac in to the realm of poor performance. This gets extremely frustrating when I have the need to open another large nasty application like Opera. Right now I am posting in it and it seems like its going to be an improvement. The only problem so far is page rendering issues which have appeared but not in a form that has caused me to need another browser. The good thing is that Opera has an RSS reader which I have grown to love using in Safari(Opera’s RSS reader is NOT nearly as nice as Safari’s).