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Memory Usage of Chrome, Firefox 3.5, et al.
An anonymous reader writes "This experiment graphs the memory usage of Chrome and Firefox 3.5 (along with Safari and Opera) over a series of 150 Web page loads using an automated script. Firefox 3.5 shows the lowest memory usage in all categories, including average memory usage, maximum memory usage, and final memory usage. Chrome uses over 1 GB of memory due to its process architecture. Safari 4 and Opera show memory usage degradation over time, while Chrome and Firefox 3.5 are more reliable in freeing memory to the OS." IE 8 was not included "because the author could not find a way to prevent it from opening a new window on each invocation of the command."
Unless you are talking about a system with severely limited memory, memory usage is probably not the right criteria for deciding which browser to use.
Something like "it doesn't show weird ass icons and bars when Slashdot decides to change CSS" is probably much more important. Firefox 3 totally screws up Slashdot in Default mode.
We all know that the thing that hogs the most memory in Firefox is all the extensions that people use to immitate other browsers... Who actually uses Firefox without a single extension and brags about how good it is anyway?
Then a few years later we end up wondering how come our software now sucks ten times more ram than before despite no corresponding quantum leap in functionality.
Running a browser as root? You, sir, are a brave man.
http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/7330/picture1uo4.png
Firefox is still my browser of choice, due to the plug-ins I use daily. I have to wonder how Flash intensive the sites loaded were.
Was that 3.5 or 3.0? 3.0 has a terrible memory footprint...
There's no answer that's always right. If memory usage was paramount, we'd all have browsers that used 1 MB of RAM and took 10 minutes to render a page, with another 2 minutes to scroll down a page.
But RAM is cheap and developers have to make compromises based on the real-world that they have to compete in. I can get a gig of RAM for about the cost of a burger lunch with my wife.
Do I really care about memory usage? Only to the extent that it's 'good enough' on my slowest computer - a dual-core Mac Mini with 512MB.
FF3 is plenty good enough for me to thoroughly enjoy an episode of 'Burn Notice' on Hulu just now on that very computer.
Sorry you are having probs with memory usage on your (ancient?) computer. Perhaps you should consider forgoing a burger lunch this week?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The author says he didn't included IE 8 because there was no way to start it without opening a new window for every invocation!
I would have preferred to have it included despite this "big drawback" and have this thing explained in a note.
A partially meaningful test (upper limit?) is always better than no test at all!
I fear that this omission is to "protect" bad performances even in comparison of a browser by a company which seems to be in deep competition with Microsoft.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
I live in tabs hell. I have... uncountable numbers of tabs open right now--over 9,000, probabaly. My Firefox memory usage can easily push 1400mb. When that happens I kill it and reload, and the memory resets at around 400-600mb.
Seeing this graph, I can only imagine what Chrome would do to me.
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
Finally, this should stop perennial "firefox is a memory hog" trolls. Hopefully.
This really hasn't been my experience, and I am not trolling. My experience, which is to say what actually happens to me when I am surfing , is that after awhile with a few (2 or 3) tabs open, FF memory usage rises to the point where my machine crawls to a stop, and I have to kill FF with the task manager.
Why is my FF experience different than the average FF fanboy? Why this is, I don't know. I do know that I am unwilling to get "under the hood" and edit config files, because I don't think I should have to.
This is my experience as what I believe to be "average" use.
That's not normal. Just because someone uses Firefox without it affecting system performance doesn't make that person a "FF fanboy." On XP, Vista, and 7, FF has no obvious effect on my system performance (on a Lenovo T61, my desktop, and my netbook, respectively). I have 3.0.11 on two of those and 3.5 on the other. The only thing I've done to get "under the hood" is install adblock plus. Right now I have 13 tabs open in Vista and FF is using 109 megs of RAM and 0-1% of my CPU cycles, with no noticeable effect on anything else. The only time I've ever felt FF3 affect system performance has been when running flash video on the netbook. Maybe flash ads are the cause of your woes; they're all removed with adblock. You might give it a try.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
In the early days, more RAM meant that you could cache some frequently used information in memory instead of recomputing it or loading it on demand. But there's a diminishing return. Nowadays, it's usually faster to recompute than read it all back from RAM, and if an interactive program uses a lot of RAM, then it's likely keeping a lot of junk in memory that it doesn't need. That tells you that the programmers didn't think things through carefully, and they probably didn't optimize other things that matter either.
Interesting to see that Opera is not the memory sipping, lightweight browser that it's proponents make it out to be.
Too bad it won't stop all the "what memory problem?" trolls.
Remember how 3.0 was touted to solve all the memory problems? I still get 1.5gb of usage *regularly* on multiple platforms with 3.0.11 without any installed extensions after a few hours. In fact, I'm on Firefox 3.0.11 on OSX 10.5.7 right now and it's at 1.3gb. You can tell when it's being a memory hog again, because videos won't play without stopping and stuttering and pages take longer to load and switching tabs feels glacial.
So, considering 3.0 originally was supposed to solve everything, I think I'll not hold my breath on 3.5. Especially for a problem that continues to happen across platforms.
I would like to see the CPU usage of different browsers tested. I run Firefox 3.5b and Safari 4 on OS X 10.5, and with JUST ONE TAB open with gmail loaded, firefox uses 8% of the CPU sustained with bursts for some reason to 40%, and safari uses 1%.
With my usual workload, with like 40 tabs open among 5 or 6 windows, Firefox uses 40%, safari 4%. This is ridiculous! This means a lot when you're on a portable on battery, not to mention general system responsiveness.
I would like to see the CPU usage of browsers compared.
This just shows that when more Windows users (or convenience-first users) move to linux, the added security wont help. Users will continue to do everything the way that is most convenient to them, and that is gonna bring more attack vectors aswell. The neverending "linux is just more secure OS" only affects those who know what they're doing, but that way it works in Windows aswell (I dont run av/fw, and I've never had any problems [checked some times really deeply from filemonitors and packet sniffing], but on the hand I know what I'm doing and what not to do).
And no, you cant teach them security. Normal users aren't that interested in it, so they wont learn.
That's simply not true on modern computers. The CPU is often idle - it's starved for data, with the bottleneck being the buss that feeds it (RAM, generally). Add to this the fact that reading neighboring areas of DRAM is a much faster than randomly reading spots in in memory spread across whole megabytes (or gigabytes, even).
Compare recomputing something, where you never have to leave L1 cache, versus flushing the first few cache levels continuously to do spread-out reads of already-computed data. It's very likely, on a modern CPU, that the first will be faster.
Of course, this will vary considerably based on what your actual problem is, and you may be getting into bad "must hand-write assembly" cases which should generally be avoided, but... it is still true that computing every time is not only smaller, it's faster some of the time. For evidence of this, check how some people are finding compiling with -Os instead of -O2 actually produces faster code. In any case... trying to stuff a 1GB working set through the Von Neumann bottleneck is never going to produce an efficient and responsive program. Firefox is not exception here, though it's getting better with each release.
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
Actually, I think you're on the verge of something here. Let me make the step for you. Repeat after me... "Nobody will choose security over convenience."
You can say you know what you're doing, but the only real difference between you and the "convenience users" you mention is that you draw the line in a different place. There are still plenty of things that are probably too inconvenient for you to do, even though they'd make your computer more secure.
Really, the most secure OS is not the one that is off, nor the one that can be used in a secure fashion if you know what you're doing. The most secure OS is the one that makes security convenient.
> They weren't trolls. I've seen the memory leaks first hand. Plenty of people have posted OS memory usage screenshots. It may have been particular extensions or advanced settings that caused the problems but it was not some work of fiction.
While they weren't trolls, people have been talking about them as if they were still there long after Firefox addressed pretty much all of them. There might be a buggy extension or two still designed to gobble up memory, but I haven't seen one no matter how much I use Firefox on the pitiful machines we have at work, and I use quite a few of the more popular extensions (Adblock+, NoScript, and about a dozen others).
So they weren't trolling, but I suspect some people are still bashing Firefox based on outdated information. Unless you have new OS memory usage screenshots to post?
Those idiots who make blogs with 300 images 400 youtube links that are 600 pages high are idiots.
But they sure push FF to the limit.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Saying that Linux is safer is like say that wearing a 'Dragon's Karate Dojo' T-shirt makes your safer. It's not the T-shirt... it's the practice of the owner that makes him safer.
There might be some rub-off safety for those that wear the T-shirt, but don't do the karate.
If everyone who didn't do karate thought they were safer wearing this T-shirt, it would become convenient for muggers to attack them.
Addons, my man, addons.
AdBlock Plus - block ads, other random stuff if you want (like Slashdot's CSS)
NoScript - blocks nasty javascript unless you enable it so you don't get owned
DownThemAll! - download all linked videos/images from a page
Or maybe since he appears so sick and tired of sudoing everything under the sun, he should consider moving to Vista and its no-longer-so-intrusive UAC.
Yes, you did used to be able to do everything you described in 256MB of RAM. But to attribute the biggest increases in web browser memory usage to programmer laziness is to ignore a drastic change in the way we (and by we, I mean the general internet-using public) use web browsers. It's no longer enough to display static web pages. Web applications are mainstream, JavaScript and Flash are practically inescapable.
I was curious, so I just checked memory usage of a web browser (Firefox 3) and an office app (Word 2007). Total memory usage, with four tabs open to fairly intensive sites (slashdot, ars technica, gmail, facebook) and a 10-page document open in Word? 150MB. I do almost all of my web browsing and general computing on a computer with a 1.8GHz Celeron processor and 1GB of RAM. The P4 system you described should be doing just fine.
You comment that IE8 was slightly faster than FF, but you don't mention which version of FF you were using.
The article is talking about the currently-RC-status 3.5. Were you, by chance, using FF2 or earlier to compare? Earlier versions of Firefox have known issues with memory leaks. Many of these, though not all, have been fixed in the 3.5 version.
If you're going to say that "IE8 is slightly faster than FF" and that it is significantly better on older machines, you really ought to have said which version of Firefox you were using.
Of course, this goes both ways. Saying Firefox 3.5 is lightyears ahead of IE, without mentioning which IE it was being compared with, is utterly useless. Yes, Firefox 3.5 is lightyears ahead of IE5, 5.5, 6, or earlier versions (if they even still exist), but not so much when compared to 7 or 8.
Anecdotal evidence really does need versions along with it to at least look intelligent.
Calling a sword by a pretty name is no more than adding perfume to poison.