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."

Comments

Scale?

[frp001]

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

A Blessing!

[Ngarrang]

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.

Re:A Blessing!

[twistedsymphony]

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.

Re:A Blessing!

[Anonymous Coward]

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 :)

Re:A Blessing!

[jlarocco]

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.

Threading

[Thaelon]

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!

Re:I knew IE7 was bad, but...

[Knuckles]

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?

Re:plugins

[AKAImBatman]

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.