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Comparing Memory Usage of Firefox 2 vs 3
DaMan writes "ZDNet picks up on yesterday's Firefox 3 beta 1 review by comparing the memory usage of Firefox 2 against the latest beta. The results from one of the tests is quite interesting, after loading 12 pages and waiting 5 minutes, 2 used 103,180KB and 3 used 62,312KB. IE used 89,756KB.""
eh.. I read slashdot all the time and I have 1gb (2*512's).
They should add the "Virtual Memory Size" column in Task Manager and use that for comparison. It better reflects actual memory consumption.
The "regular" "Memory Size" column is the "working set" - so its possible that IE or FF 2/3 took more during page loads that hasn't been reclaimed by the OS because no one neededed it.
To see how this can be bogus, try minimizing all the windows for an app and watch "Memory Size" shrink as the working set is paged to disk. "Virtual Memory Size" won't change. See here for more info.
Additionally, one (probably) should disable toolbars/extensions - depends on what you're trying to test, of course, but IE's more likely to have some bogus BHO or toolbar installed by third parties (like Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc.) that are actively sucking RAM; which affects the steady state.
One could argue that's just the real world - but the intent is to compare *browser* efficiency?
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graphically speaking
graphically speaking
There are no browsers I'm aware of that support the RAW image format, if that's what you meant. The memory overhead would be insane, not to mention file transfer times.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of kids out there that are playing web developer, who don't know that compressing photographs as GIF is bad, or who still use spacer images, or render paragraphs of text using JPGs, so there's room for improving the code that the browser has to handle, but it's not always quite as bad as your post suggests.
That being said, the nesting of tables, which still continues even on mainstream sites, requires a lot of memory to parse. Browser makers do a great job at dealing with the mess of code some people throw at them.
-- Tim
Whoever manually adds the tags to these sites misspelled one.
I'm sure that should say "whatisopera" not "whatiopera"
Just a heads up.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.