I've been gradually moving back to native apps: hexchat for IRC, pidgin for gtalk+fb messenger, thunderbird for email (heavy, but can't find something better fo

I've been gradually moving back to native apps: hexchat for IRC, pidgin for gtalk+fb messenger, thunderbird for email (heavy, but can't find something better for me). With this setup I can boot to a system that uses about 1.5GB of RAM occupied with Firefox with a couple of tabs open. Some stuff that I'm trying to eliminate that's a big memory hog: dropbox (150MB), skype (150MB).