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

Re:Graph shape

[TheRaven64]

Not a very realistic test, in that case, since most people tend to recycle browser windows. Adding in proper cleanup routines when the window is closed doesn't address this. That said, it's great that Gecko is trimming some of the fat. Hopefully it will start to be a competitor to WebKit in the mobile space soon.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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. As a web developer, I beg you, please install IE7 anyway. It's better standards support (far from being as good as gecko/webkit/khtml/opera, but still a massive improvement over IE6), support for alpha transparency, etc, makes things so much easier for us.

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

[TripMaster Monkey]

I don't doubt it...after all, it's already happened here. ^_^

Re:FF won't win

[denis-The-menace]

And they are running the test in Windows? Who knows whether there's not an undocumented feature of IE which is telling it's O$ to swap *all* FF's RAM into disk? Or even freeing FF's memory? The predator always wins.

MS has done something like this in the past and got caught.
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=drdos+windows+crash&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

Re:A Blessing!

[LWATCDR]

I still find it scary that 1ghz and 512mb is considered low end for an office PC.

I'm certainly impressed

[xx01dk]

So far with the beta. It may be purely subjective, but when I click the task bar icon, FF3 opens _instantly_ or near enough as I can tell. And I've been using FF2 since it's release.

I also left a couple of browser windows open all night last night and was able to navigate pretty well this morning; if I'd done that with FF2 it would have been like viewing the web over dial-up again.

I think what impressed me the most was the hassle-free install. I uninstalled FF2, thinking I was ready to start with a fresh browser, and to my complete surprise, FF3 installed with nearly the exact same settings as I had been using in FF2. With the exception of that pesky "home" button that I can't seem to get rid of (What, no right-click > delete option?) everything is exactly the same. I'm still trying to get used to the address bar that tries to predict what site you're looking for as well; I suspect that with some tweaking I'll be able to dial it in pretty well.

Cheers~

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

[gravis777]

,I am not exactly sure what this graph is showing. I have NEVER had IE7 take up 500 meg of Ram. Shoot, with multiple windows and videos open, I have never had it top 100. I am running it now in Vista, and it is using under 25 meg of ram. Firefox 2.0.12 is using 22 meg of Ram. Yeah, Firefox is using less, but I am seeing no where near the performance difference that they are showing on the graph. Maybe TFA might share some insight.

During intensive browsing with approximately 50 tabs, I have found that Firefox 3 generally consumes less than half of the memory used by Firefox 2.0.0.12. 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.

The memory benchmark, which uses the Talos framework and was conducted on Windows Vista, replicates real-world usage patterns by automatically cycling pages through browser windows and then closing them. Firefox 3 used less memory than Firefox 2, Internet Explorer, and Opera, and it also freed more memory than the other browsers when pages were closed. Safari 3 and Internet Explorer 8 could not be benchmarked because they crashed during the test. Once again, I have NEVER had IE7 use as much ram as they are claiming under Vista. I have to question the "replicates real-world usage patterns" thing.

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

[snoyberg]

No, I think he was saying that it's better than IE6. The original question (from his users) was why not to migrate from IE6 to IE7. And I think, feature-wise, IE7 *does* beat IE6.