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Firefox 3 May Be More Memory Efficient Than Either IE or Opera

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the but-is-it-as-efficient-as-a-red-stapler dept.

Edy52285 writes "Ars Technica has an article showing benchmarks pitting Firefox 3 Beta 4 against other browsers. Contenders include IE7, Firefox 2, Opera 9.5 Beta, and Safari 3.0.4 Beta. The piece includes a graph depicting FF3's memory usage well below that of the other browsers. The in-testing browser even trumps Opera, which has long been regarded as the fastest browser around."

16 of 370 comments (clear)

  1. I knew IE7 was bad, but... by TripMaster+Monkey · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's one thing to know that IE7 is a resource hog, but another thing entirely to view the graph in the article and be confronted with hard evidence of just how abysmal it is.

    I'm going to print out that graph and put it on my wall. Then, when my users come to me and ask why our enterprise isn't rolling out IE7 on our systems, I can just point to it.

    --
    ____

    ~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey

    1. Re:I knew IE7 was bad, but... by not+flu · · Score: 3, Informative

      I have never had 50 tabs open at once. I think my limit has been around 20, but I usually do not average more than 5. 50, for real? Does not sound like a real world test to me. 200+ tabs in all windows combined is nothing unseen for me. I hate interrupting the flow of reading a page that has tons of links for example, so I open them all in new tabs (or windows) and check them out afterwards. Shoot, a gallery of images, waiting for each pic to load is going to take a couple of minutes total! Open them all up in new tabs, faster to switch between tabs than to wait for each of them to load in front of my eyes. 50 tabs is "light" usage to many users, such as myself.
  2. Based on my experience with FF2 by Chrisq · · Score: 4, Informative

    Based on my experience with firefox 2 I would say that once you have a few plugins (cough: *adblock*) the graph will not be flat but will slowly increase. Not that this is the fault of the browser writers, but it will be many people's real world experience.

    1. Re:Based on my experience with FF2 by pohl · · Score: 5, Informative

      Rejoice: FF3 has some garbage collection improvements that should fix many leaks caused by browser add-ons.

      --

      The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...

  3. Re:Graph shape by savala · · Score: 4, Informative

    Out of curiosity, what's the dropoff and flatline near the end of both Firefox lines on the graph? Anyone know?

    From the original blog post:

    For the results below we loaded 29 different web pages through 30 windows over 11 cycles (319 total page loads), always opening a new window for each page load (closing the oldest window alive once we hit 30 windows). At the end we close all the windows but one and let the browser sit for a few minutes so see if they will reclaim memory, clear short-term caches, etc.

    So that is all the memory being reclaimed upon closing all but one of the windows, and then doing nothing whatsoever.

  4. Re:Remember when people coded for small memory use by Nibbler999 · · Score: 3, Informative

    That graph is based on 30 open windows at a time, not 'basic web browsing'.

  5. Re:That's when testing with their own tool by FrankNFurter · · Score: 5, Informative

    How about the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, produced by the WebKit developers?

    The latest Firefox 3 nightly beat Safari 3.1 as well as the latest WebKit nightly on my iMac (2.0 GHz C2D, 2 GB RAM). You might want to run your own tests; you'll find that Firefox 3 is pretty damn quick.

    --
    "Slashdot - the one place on the internet where guys brag about how small it is." - that IT girl
  6. plugins by lseltzer · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've been using FF3 for months and it's definitely efficient with memory, but the graph doesn't reflect my own experience with IE7 and FF2. At the moment, for instance, on my XPSP2 system with both FF2 and IE7 running, probably for weeks, FF2 is using about 509MB and IE7 about 208MB.

    Perhaps some of the differences here have to do with plugins? There are still a bunch that don't work with FF3.

    1. Re:plugins by AKAImBatman · · Score: 3, Informative

      Those system DLLs are shared by multiple programs (at least in theory) and thus have their memory usage accounted for separate from the programs that use them. In fact, the memory counts against the operating system. Microsoft uses this fact to hide much of IE's memory in DLLs that have been installed as part of the OS.

      So unless you have tools to pick apart where your OS's memory is going, you're going to get bad results for IE.

      Try using something like Process Explorer instead. It will give you a much better view into what memory is being used and where.

      --
      Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
  7. Re:Remember when people coded for small memory use by mi · · Score: 4, Informative

    That graph is based on 30 open windows at a time, not 'basic web browsing'.

    My (very) significant other keeps 5-10 windows open with 4-12 tabs in each... No kidding...

    Here is the top(1) entry of her firefox-session (running linux-firefox-2 on FreeBSD/amd64):

    84676 i 1 96 0 1078M 613M select 1 524:47 4.98% firefox-bin

    My own (native) session uses 2.5 times less... In other words — "common practice" is a very loose standard :)

    --
    In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
  8. Re:Graph shape by epine · · Score: 5, Informative

    I happened to have a Fedora system, so I stuck with FF 1.5.x right up until the first day of FF 3b1. I do a lot of work in MediaWiki environments, often pounding away the whole day in FF. Somehow, I rarely manage to have less than 50 tabs open, occasionally as many as 200, in four to eight windows scattered over four desktops.

    Memory usage under 1.5.x was unbelievably bad. After a week of heavy use, it would routinely plateau in the 1-1.5 GB range, at which point it would become intolerably slow and force me to restart.

    I've downloaded every FF 3 beta the day of first release, and pounded on them all.

    3b1 crapped out after just over 2 weeks of heavy use. 3b2 was noticeably better, but not perfect. I wasn't thrilled with 3b3. Page transitions to previously open tabs became more sluggish, back/forward browsing was slower, and they really messed up window to window tab move (didn't take the tab history along for the ride, causing me to lose some major unsaved edits while discovering this unpleasant fact, which happily is now fixed in 3b4).

    3b4 has been tremendously solid over the relatively short period since its release. Virtual 540MB, resident 330MB. That's spectacularly low by the standards of previous releases for the intensity of my use. Back/forward page transitions on aged tabs remains slower than for 3b1, but not annoyingly so. Overall, it just feels solid now.

    I'm having trouble comprehending that *anyone* once said Firefox had no serious memory leaks. Say what? Firefox 1.5 was the Ginny Sacramoni of web browsers. I'm happy to confirm that Firefox has successfully excised the 90-pound mole from its waddling derriere.

  9. Re:Crash by CastrTroy · · Score: 3, Informative

    Firefox 2 lets you reopen closed tabs, so I imagine that Firefox 3 would also have that functionality.

    --

    Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  10. JavaScript performance by Niten · · Score: 3, Informative

    Reduced memory usage is great, but if you're more interested in speed you should take a look at Firefox 3b4's results on the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark, where testers commonly found that it performed twice as well as the latest Opera beta, and nearly three times as fast as Firefox 2.

    I haven't yet heard anything definitive about Gecko's performance in FF3 with respect to FF2 or the rendering engines in other major web browsers, but from my own experience with the betas I can subjectively say "it's fast"; if I'm missing out on speed using FF3b4 instead of the latest WebKit, I can't tell the difference myself.

    And Beta 4 is quite stable, to boot. Mozilla really pulled out all the stops on this one... unless you have incompatible extensions holding you back, do yourself a favor and upgrade now.

  11. NoScript makes a major impact on Firefox memory by tjwhaynes · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm having trouble comprehending that *anyone* once said Firefox had no serious memory leaks. Say what? Firefox 1.5 was the Ginny Sacramoni of web browsers. I'm happy to confirm that Firefox has successfully excised the 90-pound mole from its waddling derriere.

    If you ran NoScript on Firefox, you probably were entirely happy with the memory usage. Much of the memory fragmentation and leaks due to circular references was caused by Javascript, either on pages loaded or other extensions running. NoScript radically reduces the amount of Javascript being executed by your browser and therefore radically reduces the amount of memory used/fragmented/leaked.

    Plus of course, the performance of page loading also improves because your browser isn't trying to execute some moronic scripts designed to track your movements and display "punch the monkey" ads.

    Cheers,
    Toby Haynes

    --
    Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
  12. Re:Crash by matt_hs · · Score: 3, Informative

    Really? I can't find any clue that it's possible, much less how to do it. Is it documented somewhere, or is it an "Easter egg" that you just have to stumble across accidentally (or learn from someone else)?

    Presuming you're not joking, look under History to Recently Closed Tabs.
    Firefox 2.0.0.12. No special plug-ins, add-ons, etc. etc. etc.
  13. Re:Crash by matt_hs · · Score: 3, Informative

    Not joking at all. I've seen that "Recently Closed Tabs" entry in the History menu, but it's always greyed out and unusable. I just tested it by opening a new tab, selecting it to verify that it was a real tab, and closing it. The "Recently Closed Tabs" menu entry is still greyed out, although I just closed a tab. I've also had a number of other tabs open during the day, and closed them, and that "Recently Closed Tabs" thingy is always greyed out when I check it.

    So how does one enable it?

    (This is on a Mac Powerbook with OSX 10.4.11, if that matters. I've also seen that menu item with FF on my linux box and my wife's NT and Vista systems, and it was also greyed out there. So I'm baffled. What good is it if it can't be used? ;-)

    You don't have the Estonian language pack installed, do you??? :-) https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/129749Ubuntu Bug 129749 discusses the issue (although I understand yours is on OSX . . .)

    There are a few bug reports I found whilst Googling and also looking in Google Groups. Some IceWeasel Bug ID #400704 commentary points to not having a home page defined; one user said defining the home page to be "about:blank" fixed it. More promisingly (I think) is that under about:config, there is an entry called browser.sessionstore.enabled. Try checking it and turn it on if it's off. http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.support.firefox/browse_thread/thread/4b9ba0eb24229c34/d4a1b0188a9e17ac?hl=en&lnk=st&q=firefox+%22recently+closed+tabs%22+(%22grayed%22+OR+%22greyed%22)#d4a1b0188a9e17ac

    Just a guess . . . since I haven't experienced it myself.