WTH? Linux software doing the "bloat thing"?

From a top screen output … on my laptop:

top - 18:43:01 up  1:06,  2 users,  load average: 1.19, 1.36, 1.17
Tasks: 178 total,   3 running, 175 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu0  : 11.9%us,  3.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 84.2%id,  0.0%wa,  1.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu1  : 76.2%us,  5.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 17.8%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  1.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   2571704k total,  1640064k used,   931640k free,    36796k buffers
Swap:   995988k total,        0k used,   995988k free,   476952k cached
  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 7367 landman   20   0 1374m 541m  39m S   57 21.5  29:46.90 firefox
 6330 root      20   0  204m  76m  19m R   27  3.0   7:49.21 Xorg
 7214 landman   20   0  564m 119m  27m S    7  4.8   0:37.56 thunderbird-bin

This is wrong … so … very … very … wrong.