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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."
I couldn't find a way to keep it from sucking so forcefully all the air was evacuated from my office every time it was run.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
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.
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.
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?
I use Firefox and Safari regularly. I use two web browsers because each one does something vastly better than the other. Firefox for porn and online transactions, Safari for basic day-to-day anything that might include bookmark management (long story short, every browser I've used EXCEPT safari still does bookmark management using some variant of the horrific Netscape method - this includes IE, Mozilla, Firefox, etc - whereas Safari is the first browser I've used that does it in a non-bullshit fashion). However, useable as it is for bookmarks, Safari's a dick when it comes to password management and a few other things - most notably, how the browser handles while the system is paging out or otherwise shot in the ass with RAM overuse from other applications.
Long story short, under ANY kind of system load - we're talking ANYTHING above IDLE - Firefox is more responsive than Safari. When the system is shitting gold plated bricks trying to deal with the demands After Effects or Photoshop or Final Cut Pro is putting on it, Safari is beyond useless... and Firefox is responsive.
It all boils down to memory usage. Specifically, Swap/pagefile useage. On the Mac, firefox seems to be more responsive under load while safari is LESS responsive under the same conditions - it has ultimately has nothing to do with RAM usage and everything to do with how the respective applications use swap/pagefile.
Eat as much ram as you like... but until Apple does something about disk I/O, stay the HELL away from swap - or I'll use the application that does. (namely, Firefox.)
Summing the memory usage of all the Chrome processes is probably not the correct thing to do, as the memory usage indicated most likely includes shared libraries. I can't say this for sure about Vista, but on all sane operating systems, each shared library is loaded only once into memory, and then shared among different running programs.
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.
Well, and here's mine, after half a day of heavy usage:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
8745 root 20 0 267m 106m 22m S 9.3 10.6 2:38.87 firefox-bin
5242 root 19 -1 334m 24m 8540 S 1.3 2.4 0:36.26 X
5405 root 20 0 37520 11m 8408 S 0.0 1.1 0:01.16 xfdesktop
5400 root 20 0 19468 10m 6964 S 0.0 1.0 0:02.72 xfce4-panel
5398 root 20 0 18600 9272 6696 S 0.0 0.9 0:00.80 xfwm4
Firefox...as root...REALLY?!
You should be ashamed.
I'm glad to hear that Firefox has finally improved its memory usage. Although my system has plenty of memory, I still find that the amount of memory FF3 requires causes a very annoying slowdown.
Of late, I've been using Midori as an alternative. With it's current git version and a recent WebKit build (r44951), I've found it to perform better than any other browser I've used (opera, konqueror, firefox). Although it does have a few minor kinks, it supports pretty much every site I've come across and works considerably better with mozilla plugins (namely, flash) than Konqueror and Opera.
Currently with an instance I've been using for the last few days, Midori is using 77 MBs of memory (for comparison, my other running browsers: opera- 120 MBs, Konqueror- 91 MBs, Firefox- 119 MBs). I didn't do any even moderately sophisticated benchmarks suck as those in the article, but that beats the average and final amounts of memory of FF3.5 as shown in the article. Obviously this is not Windows-friendly, but I'd say Midori deserves some more attention, considering that (for me, at least) it outperforms all the other major browsers.
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.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Running a browser as root? You, sir, are a brave man.
Is the Linux version of Firefox particularly horrid or something? When using more than 10 tabs or so, my memory usage is typically in the 600mb+ range. It's currently taking 1.1g resident for about 40 tabs. I'm on x86-64, but even if we assume there's a full doubling of RAM usage due to the architecture, that's still 550mb equivalent, which his test never hits even with 150 tabs.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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"
The report doesn't consider plugins, which are the things that I think most people identify with Firefox feeling bloated or memory heavy. Vanilla Firefox may very well be light on memory, but once you load in a handful (or a few dozen) of your favorite plugins, the tests may not turn out the same.
Keep in mind, I am not attempting to imply that the results would certainly be worse, just that they are currently unknown to us and that it's something that needs to be considered.
Some of those "trolls" weren't about memory usage, but about overall degradation of user experience over time (hey, I have tons of memory, apps should use it).
I used Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox almost since its inception, plus functionality of few nice plugins isn't implemented in Opera (vast majority of features/plugins that, according to claims, keep people on Firefox, actually are), but the latter is the only browser which doesn't force me into managing it / using it in a particular way just so it remains usable (Chrome comes close to it, technically, but it lacks features; IE is of course even worse; didn't really try Safari; and what's funny...Mozilla Suite/Seamonkey is noticeably better than "leaner" Firefox)
As a matter of fact...Firefox 2.x was much better than 3.x (I check it every few months) when it comes to UI remaining responsive/etc. under heavy usage; which causes me to suspect they overshoot with memory usage reduction, missed that sweet spot of amount of memory required by particular codebase to work properly (and Gecko has it higher than others - how many years are we waiting for mobile version? Will it work on my 230MHz AMR phone with 12MB of user RAM? (Webkit and Opera do...))
One that hath name thou can not otter
It's 3.0, 3.5 has a new icon.
New things are always on the horizon
If you are trying to explain the mechanism to a layman, you need to steer clear of terms like "processes" and "threads" as part of the explanation.
Imagine the memory in your computer is like a housing development. At first, there is a lot of open space. The open space can be partitioned so that houses can be built. Each of those houses represents a process. As long as you have more space, you can build more houses.
Inside each house, you have rooms. In computer terms, these would be threads. Each room has a specific job - kitchen, bedroom, bathroom. Sometimes you need more rooms, so you have to build them. This may mean that the size of the house needs to grow, and the amount of acreage the house needs must grow with it.
As long as a house exists, it will continue to occupy the space it is on. In computer terms, the process will hold on to the memory it has already claimed. However, the corollary to this is that when the house is torn down, all the land it occupied is returned to the "free acreage".
If a room is remodeled, it will not result in a change to the actual house size. Adding more rooms will always take up more land, but removing those rooms doesn't change the occupied land size at all.
In the same way, a process can grow and grow, but as soon as it completes (you close a tab in the browser), the memory will go back to the operating system so other processes can use it. But if the process does not complete because it uses threads to build those same tabs, then the process will continue to take up that memory.
Also consider that a house may burn down. If a problem happens in one room, a house-wide emergency may erupt. A fire in the kitchen may engulf the entire house and bring it down.
In a perfect world, what happens in one house should not affect other surrounding houses. If one house burns down, the other houses around it should be fine. Same with processes. If a thread in one process crashes, it may bring down the whole process. However, since processes are separated from each other, other processes should not be affected.
Then why use threads at all? Why not use processes all the time, since they are clearly safer. Well, why don't we only have one room in our house? Threads are needed within processes to perform important roles. Also, since they all exist in the same process, they can share information (like using light switches downstairs to control lights in the foyer). So a careful combination of threads and processes are necessary to create any kind of meaningful application. There is no right or wrong answer, but Google seems to think that isolating each browsing experience from another is the right way. Firefox thinks that putting all the rooms in one house and simply growing the house is the right way. Everyone is different.
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 fact, you can get Firefox to work the quickest by selecting "File" - "Work Offline." Pretty secure, too.
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.
Do you think it's so hard to replace "which" as well?
Or sha1sum?
That could be a little harder, but I'm sure you get my point by now.
However, there are several good reasons not to run your browser as root. First, it can do a lot more damage if it misbehaves. Second, there's greater security exposure since it means that other users who don't have sudo access on the local machine might be able to get root by exploiting the browser.
E.g. if someone exploits sendmail, but it's run as a non-privileged user, then that user might be able to find a hole exploitable only via localhost to gain root access via the browser. This is why you should run as few things as root as possible, even if they don't access remote machines.
I am sure that this is true for all of the browsers, but in Opera's case...
The machine has 4GB in question and Opera is set to "automatic" for the memory cache (default). According to this article, this instructs Opera to use up to ~10% of the system memory. This is quite tunable based on the environment, so one could easily optimize for a low-end machine and have satasfactory performance. The browser using the memory effectively is the more interesting test, which this benchmark fails to determine. An interesting detail in the graphs is how sharp the memory reclaim cycles are, where the smoother indicates better memory management. The graphs indicate that Opera does a good job in this regard.
You test all the browsers except the most up-to-date version of the most popular one. In other words, the one that matters the most.
Benchmarks are for people who choose software. Only a small minority choose IE. In a way, IE8 was included. It failed to compete due to lack of necessary features.
Wow, I *wish* I could get Firefox 3.5 to use so little memory! As I write this Firefox is using 1821M VIRT, 944M RES...and I only have 23 tabs open! Firefox memory usage has always been abysmal for me. Does Firefox perform drastically differently on Linux than on Windows? I would be quite horrified if it actually performed better on Windows, but I don't understand how it possibly managed to be so low...I've never seen Firefox use less than .5G with even a few tabs open for a while... I realize my personal experience involves extensions, plugins and other things which suck of RAM, it still seems terribly high for me. If I leave it running for several days, it will peak 2G and I have to restart the browser.
It's great that in the future Firefox might be better, but here and now, the latest stable version is 3.0.11, and while Firefox has many redeeming qualities, speed, memory usage and general performance is not one of them.
Interesting to see that Opera is not the memory sipping, lightweight browser that it's proponents make it out to be.
Finally, this should stop perennial "firefox is a memory hog" trolls. Hopefully.
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.
You're the one trolling.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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.
Finally the Windows users are using Linux?
A proud member of the Onion-in-Hand alliance
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.
While you wait for them to figure it out, enjoy the Flashblock plugin.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
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.
I would really like to see this benchmark repeated with half and double of RAM available.
In these environments, memory allocation is an extremely important capacity planning criterion for application deployment.
\\ would love a Firefox addon or web proxy for remote desktop environments that dynamically rewrites the header of flash movies to allow globally reducing the playback frame rate to something arbitrary (like 2fps), as it would much more user-friendly than blocking flash altogether. I would site-license 1000 copies of that sucka tomorrow...
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.
What the hell is up with Slashdot's CSS? I keep seeing images all over the comments (the bars used on the new comments section, the relationship icons). Is anyone else seeing them. I'm using Firefox 3.5.
Regards
elFarto
Plus, on Windows at least, the way it's made seems to let old tabs go to swap. That way it sometimes suddenly takes a lot of time to open up a tab you last used 8 hours ago, but it doesn't take as much RAM at any particular point. Can't say about Chromium on Linux, because I don't use swap there.
This is simply not true for things like web browsing. How are you going to "recompute" a web page the user visited 10 minutes ago? The only way to make going back to that page fast is to cache it. RAM is a fine way of caching things.
There are a variety of tradeoffs possible. Do we:
1 Just store the original HTML/compressed images? This was Netscape's original solution, and works reasonably well.
2 Store parsed HTML, to prevent a reparse stage being necessary when redisplaying the page?
3 Store uncompressed images, to prevent decompression being necessary when redisplaying the page?
4 Store the DOM and layout information, to prevent relayout being necessary when redisplaying the page?
5 Store an image of the page as it was shown to the user with their browser size/settings as they were when it was last shown?
Each of these successively takes less cpu time but uses more memory than the previous. Firefox does the latter, and I'm not at all convinced that is the right point in the tradeoff. Redrawing the page image from the DOM should take only a few milliseconds. Recalculating the DOM and layout is more intensive, but still not likely to take long. I'm not sure which of 3 or 4 I think is best, but I suspect it is one of those. Although even 2 is worth considering, as it is a substantial memory saving compared to 3, and probably wouldn't take too long.
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.
Why? I run a very small custom linux off a read-only flash on a very-very old panasonic notebook whose HDD burned accidentally.
I like it because it is still smaller than a netbook, has a touch screen, and the battery lasts 7 hours.
I couldn't care less if someone compromises my current session (even if they could), as I'll be starting afresh from the flash rom next time anyway.
Besides, I could very well be running root with UID 1000 instead of 0, how would you know?
Anyway, back on topic, the new firefox isn't the memory hog it used to be, at least on my system.
Exactly. I think I've su'd once in the last month, and that was yesterday to mount a ram disk to use as the Firefox disk cache. That was a nice tip BTW, significant speedup in page loads and UI responsiveness.
/path/to/chosen/mountpoint
/path/to/chosen/mountpoint .
mount -t tmpfs -o 'size=100M' tmpfs
Create an about:config preference called browser.cache.disk.parent_directory with a string value of
You do need to restart the browser for it to take effect. I also chowned the ram disk to my user name so that FF can write to it. 100MB is probably a bit too big, but when I set it as 50MB it filled up. I'll tweak it later when I see what is usual for the cache. It's currently running at 47.47MB with 2 tabs, and I'm not anal about avoiding closing the browser if I'm not using it.
I use QuickRestart plugin, so when Firefox is having her period, I just restart it quickly. All the web pages that were open will reload again.
Usually I use it for Java unresponsive errors, since I have 4 ton of ram.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
> 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.
As I write this Firefox mem usage is 271,480 MB and had peaked at 323,864. I have 4 windows open. One has 5 tabs, the other have 1 tab each. I just closed all except the 5 tab window and I'm only back down to 260,892.
That's not as extreme as it once was, but it's not gone. I get a truckload of memory back by killing the browser and starting afresh. Some of that is necessary due to session history etc. but the fact remains FF is a memory hog.
If you're not seeing similar memory usage your browsing habits are probably different. Possibilities include:
- Different extensions
- Visiting different web sites with different types of content (eg. flash)
- Using tabs and new windows differently
That doesn't make what I'm doing abnormal, unusual or wrong. FF gripes are legitimate.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
You're comparing to an OS that was released in 2001 (xp) and which isn't really sold anymore, nor does it come with new PC's. In Vista and Win7 users dont run by default as administrator and install even says that its encouraged to create separate account for user. UAC (win7 has better uac than vista) also protects doing stuff under admin. Its just as usable as sudo *if you know what you're doing*. Different tool doesn't change users stupidness or ignorance.
Except, under Linux, it isn't really that much easier to run as root. Actually - running as root is a hassle because many apps complain if you do so.
Firefox mem usage is 271,480 MB
Wait, why are you running firefox on a supercomputer?
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.
It comes on pretty much every new netbook.
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.
Someone really needs to put up a website, say, firefoxmemoryhog.com, and having people submit *exact* details from their machines when this happens. Which extensions are being used, which OS the person has, which version of FF. You hear these anecdotal reports about insane FF memory usage, but they're useless without hard config data. It's gotta be particular add-ons and plug-ins causing the problem. Just need to identify which ones, and shame them into fixing their issues.
Wow stop feeding this troll. LOOK AT HIS NAME. How can you not see this? I can't believe he got modded up, probably because there's some windows fanboys around, or just those idiots who believe every troll that jumps out and says "in MY experience!"
Firefox runs all its tabs in one process, whereas IE8 creates a new process for each one. So if you have one tab open in FF and one in IE, then IE might be smaller (FF is about 130mb and IE about 60). But each new "tab" (not really, it's a new process so may as well be a new window or instance of the program) in IE is another 30-60MB, but each new tab in FF adds a negligible amount of memory usage.
Open five tabs in each, tally up the usage from all the IE processes, and then compare.
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