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Firefox 3 May Be More Memory Efficient Than Either IE or Opera
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."
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.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
From the original blog post:
So that is all the memory being reclaimed upon closing all but one of the windows, and then doing nothing whatsoever.
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
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.
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):
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.
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.