Just to make it clear: it's not Firefox itself that is hitting the virtual address space limit, but the linker when trying to link and optimize the source code.

Just to make it clear: it's not Firefox itself that is hitting the virtual address space limit, but the linker when trying to link and optimize the source code. To put things into perspective, last time I compiled Webkit (just the engine, not the whole browser) it ate ~1 GB of RAM, so it's not that surprising that the linker needs 3 GB for Firefox