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

Remember when people coded for small memory use?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is NO WAY that I need 250MB to basic web browsing, yet that is what the graph seems to indicate.
I've got an old Win98 computer in the basement with 64MB and Netscrape 3.0 and it renders 95% of the websites out there

From the ars discussion...

[ErroneousBee]

One of the ars comments:

memory usage was one of the biggest reasons i went from FF to IE

On the graph, IE has a smaller footprint and no evidence of memory leaks.

Its also obvious from the graph that those FF2 being a leaky ol' memory hog are spot on the money.

We should go through the comments here on slashdot and make sure all those complaining about FF2 memory use have the meaning of the slope and shapes on these graphs carefully explained to them.

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

[somersault]

As a web developer, I beg you, please install IE7 anyway Nice try, AC. I bet you're one of those people running a dodgy porn site that tries to exploit IE.. :p FFS Microsoft, stop forcing your new trash on us just when your old trash is starting to get beaten into shape after several hundred patches. And stop making stupid interface designs. I don't care if it has supposedly better standards support if I have to look at *that*. In FF I get rid of the bookmarks bar, put everything else onto one line (back/forward buttons to the left of the file menu, address and google search bar to the right), and am left with lots of nice browsing real estate at 1680x1050 \o/ I don't care too much about memory leaks when FF just seems to run and render better, and I don't tend leave FF running for hours at a time either. It does have a fairly poor startup time but that's from all the addons I have installed. Microsoft don't seem to be able to render anything nicely, it always feels flimsy (for example dragging windows around in Windows, you get flickering even with an excellent graphics card and such - they need to double buffer or something.. Vista probably renders windows nicer, but that's a moot point considering that the rest of it is garbage)