Firefox is usually a bit less hardware intensive than Chrome, really there are a lot of variables, including hardware configuration and Windows version.
Set Firefox to restore tabs on startup, then just quit & relaunch it. It will only load the currently open tab, so it will only use as much memory as required ...
With the same 37 tabs and extensions, firefox is currently using 6 gigabytes of memory. The tabs used are from reputable sources, so firefox shouldn't be ...