As your user, you only can see your launchd bootstrap in OSX. You live in the Aqua domain. So, to see everything that is running because of you:
launchctl list
Will show you what is loaded. That's not all, however. launchctl has many options, such as:
bslist [PID | ..] [-j]
This prints out Mach bootstrap services and their respective
states. While the namespace appears flat, it is in fact hierar-
chical, thus allowing for certain services to be only available
to a subset of processes. The three states a service can be in
are active ("A"), inactive ("I") and on-demand ("D").
If [PID] is specified, print the Mach bootstrap services avail-
able to that PID. If [..] is specified, print the Mach bootstrap
services available in the parent of the current bootstrap. Note
that in Mac OS X v10.6, the per-user Mach bootstrap namespace is
flat, so you will only see a different set of services in a per-
user bootstrap if you are in an explicitly-created bootstrap
subset.
If [-j] is specified, each service name will be followed by the
name of the job which registered it.
So as your user:
launchctl bslist -j
Will give you everything that is loaded into launchd currently, anything actually running will have an 'A' beside it.
...
A com.apple.cookied (com.apple.cookied)
D com.apple.coreservices.quarantine-resolver (com.apple.coreservices.uiagent)
Here cookied (wtf?) is running.
Below, the quarantine resolver is loaded, but not actually running.
Now, perhaps, you may be inclined to try something like:
sudo launchctl list
Thinking that as root, you will see everything. No. Root lives down in the System domain, and can not really see you clearly. You will get things running in the System, or daemon domain.
Reading the man page, you'll find:
sudo launchctl bstree -j # This should show you everything.
ps au
As the command that gives you the entire Mach Tree that is running on the system.
Activity monitor shows you some things, but I don't really like to depend on it.
Reference:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#technotes/tn2083/_index.html
Guess what guys. It looks like there is no memory leak after all!
"Samsung" was generous enough to enhance my notebook with a tool called "IntelliMemory" which flew past my bloatware-radar because initially I thought this was related to "Ïntel". It "intelligently manages my cache allocating it to RAM" but actually I think it is crap and a memory hog, besides all storage is SSD anyway.
Peace.
Best Answer
Don't use FireFox. In my experience, the memory leaks in FireFox have made it unusable. If you have tabs open to pages that auto-update, like wsj.com or nytimes.com, my experience was that it only takes a day for the leaks to accumulate sufficiently to bring Windows to its knees. (This is on Win7 x64 on a Core i7 with 10GB.)
This is where Chrome really excels. In Chrome, each tab is a separate process, meaning the firewalling between pages effectively limits the memory leak problem. Try switching to Chrome (or one of the other major browsers) and see if that makes your problem go away.