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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."

12 of 370 comments (clear)

  1. Scale? by frp001 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I just love this when someone provides a graph without even a detailed scale!

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  2. A Blessing! by Ngarrang · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Firefox 3 will certainly be a blessing to my company if this holds up through official release. My company is standardized on Firefox for all web browsing and intranet apps. Our PCs are not necessarily cutting edge technology filled with copious amounts of RAM. The average speed is 1GHz and 512Mb RAM running XP. Now if only all apps took the route of less/improved memory usage with each new version instead of the bloat I am suffering with Microsoft Word, Citrix, etc.

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    Bearded Dragon
    1. Re:A Blessing! by twistedsymphony · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This is one of the greatest selling points to open source software IMO.

      When you have a product like MS Office, every year that they release a new version they have to load it up with new features to encourage people to buy it, despite the fact that most users only use a fraction of the feature set and rarely need any of the new features the new version offers. This can be applied to most for profit software.

      When you have a product like Open Office it's being developed by people who are working more for their affinity for the software rather than a paycheck. The result here is that unneeded features are left out of the core application and once there is a solid interface and feature set they start turning towards making the product more stable and more efficient.

      Of course there are exceptions on both sides of the fence, but this is something I've noticed with most of the OSS that I use. By running nearly all OSS alternatives I'm able to use the latest versions of my most common apps on my old P3 733 laptop and it feels just as peppy as the high performance rig I use at work loaded with MS apps.

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    2. Re:A Blessing! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      1) People may only use 20% of an application's functionality, but different people use a different 20%. So a competing application needs to implement at least 80% of the features to even get a look in.

      2) "Open Office" ... "a solid interface and feature set they start turning towards making the product more stable and more efficient". Open Office is nice, and it is free, but it's not a great overall example of a wonderful application :)

    3. Re:A Blessing! by jlarocco · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You do realize that Opera works wonderfully on PCs with specs even lower than that, right? Guess it doesn't help you much now, but you should be kicking yourself for the past.

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      Maybe not
  3. Not real world (for me)... by alyawn · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I think a much better test would be to see a single window with 30 tabs. I don't know anyone that would have 30 windows of a browser running. All this proves to me is that FF does a better job of sharing resources across instances. Does anyone use windows rather than tabs to manage their browsing?

  4. Threading by Thaelon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But what about threading?

    I'm tired of every browser tab and window I have open locking up so Flash can render in one of the windows.

    Even IE doesn't do this!

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    Question everything

  5. Re:I knew IE7 was bad, but... by Knuckles · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Along that vein; be advised that notepad has a VERY small footprint.

    you seem to be inferring that feature-wise, IE7 is better then FF3. Care to elaborate?

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    "When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
  6. It's not the average speed that matters by goombah99 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    While I know you were making a joke youre point was actually insightful. Namely the browser speed wars is something of a game of leapfrog. Any browser that is reasonably fast is a good browsers. But what matters is that the browser maker keeps the browser among the best at all time.

    That is to say if every 3 years browser X gets a big update and becomes the fastest for a few months and then gets severely eclipsed for 2 years. it's not the best browser.

    Speaking of Karma hell, a good example of this is Thunderbird email which occasionally shines but then goes and wnaders in the woods for years at a time

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    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    1. Re:It's not the average speed that matters by whackco · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Ok, just because a program uses LESS memory doesn't make it faster or slower. In fact, the more memory it uses to cache more, the less disk thrashing generally, and the faster experience.

      This is also a common misconception in Vista's memory management. It fills the empty space in memory with things 'pre-fetched' for faster loading, etc. I like it, and it works well for me.

      Jezz Slashdot - I expected more from the worlds largest concentration of geek power.

  7. Re:plugins by AKAImBatman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    IE lies. Much of its memory is hidden in system DLLs that don't show up in the Windows Task Manager. To get an accurate read on how much memory IE is using, you need to use special tools that track memory across the system.

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  8. Note to submitter : memory-footprint != speed by mxs · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The in-testing browser even trumps Opera, which has long been regarded as the fastest browser around. And how does a smaller memory-footprint yield faster performance, EXACTLY ? The two are not necessarily related -- or even related in a way you might like. There are plenty of algorithms that sacrifice memory to become more speedy (and vice versa). The size of a memory-footprint of an application tells you exactly ... nothing ... about its speed, or its relative speed to other programs with different footprints.

    Quite honestly, I don't care about memory consumption so long as it remains reasonable. My Opera-process has been running for weeks with, at times, heavy usage (dozens of open windows, some with highly dynamic pages). It's been stable and quick throughout that time, and did not grow to a size where I'd have to wonder what the hell is causing swapping.
    Yes, you can crash Opera (often related to badly coded plugins), and yes, you can make it unresponsive. I found, however, that it's far easier to do that to Firefox than Opera, and that Opera has been consistently snappier. Maybe that'll change with FF3. Hopefully it will, competition in that arena is always good.