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Real-World Firefox 3 Memory Usage Leads the Field

Posted by kdawson on from the free-what-you-alloc dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The author developed a program to snapshot memory usage per process every 3 seconds on Windows. Using this he recorded 3 hours of memory usage for five different browsers under real-world usage scenarios: Safari 3.1, Firefox 3, Flock 1.2 (a browser based on Firefox 2), Opera 9.5, and Internet Explorer 8. A million data points indicate that Firefox 3 has a surprising advantage over the other browsers tested. These are real-world tests and not contrived benchmarks."

3 of 406 comments (clear)

  1. Wonder what Firefox 2 looked like ... by xmas2003 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Interesting test - pretty amazing how FF3 basically flatlines at around 120 MBytes for over 2 hours of usage ... would have been interesting if the same methodology could be used with FF2 to see how much of an improvement FF3 is over that and how well the leaks were fixed.

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    Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
    1. Re:Wonder what Firefox 2 looked like ... by neokushan · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Perhaps in days gone by it would have been shocking for browsers to use so much memory, but the memory being used is directly related to the content on the sites it browse.
      We recently seen studies indicating that the average website has tripled in size in the last couple of years alone, imagine how much bigger websites have got in the last 10-15 years?
      More images, higher resolution/dpi ones at that, flash, plus there's all the scripting engines and other plugins that have accumulated as well.
      While I comlpetely agree that software bloat shouldn't be accepted (Nero, I'm looking at you) and if anything, programs should become MORE efficient with age (in an ideal world), I think browsers could be one exception since the content they're handling has got so much bigger.
      So really, the best way to indicate progress here is to pit the fully featured browsers against each other and see who comes out on top. Probably still wont be firefox, but I bet the big three still use a lot of RAM compared to what was the norm a few years ago.

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      +1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
  2. But what memory metric was taken? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    IIRC the memory displayed in process manager isn't necessarily the memory requested/used by the program, but merely what Windows has allocated, partially based on the applications requirements and partially based on what Windows _thinks_ the program needs.

    As such there's room for applications to look like they're using more memory than they are which can lead to misleading stats. If this test has only taken into account the memory windows has allocated it doesn't necessarily act as a measure of how efficient the program is at least, just how good it is at playing Window's memory management system.