Firefox Notably Improved In Tom's Hardware's Latest Browser Showdown

Billly Gates writes "Tom's Hardware did another benchmark showdown, since several releases of both Firefox and Chrome came out since their last one. Did Mozilla clean up its act and listen to its users? The test results are listed here. Firefox 13.01 uses the least amount of RAM with 40 tabs opened, while Chrome uses the highest (surprisingly). Overall, Firefox scored medium for memory efficiency, which measures RAM released after tabs are closed. Also surprising: IE 9 is still king of the lowest RAM usage for just one tab. Bear in mind that these tests were benchmarked in Windows 7. Windows XP and Linux users will have different results, due to differences in memory management. It is too bad IE 10, which is almost finished, wasn't available to benchmark." Safari and Opera are also along for the fight.

Comments

Re:who gives a fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps those of us designing standard software sets for an enterprise... too bad none of the browsers tested are fit as they all use some retarded form of automatic update that will break said standards.

more information on firefox

[cyfer2000]

there is a website called are we slim yet tracking the memory usage of firefox.

Re:more information on firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

This. Mod up.

The stuttering behaviour became extra prevalent starting with Firefox 13 (for me anyway). Sites like Amazon would cause the browser to stutter while trying to scroll through content before images were loaded. A complete uninstall + clean + reinstall of FF13 didn't help. Rolling back to FF12 worked fine. Disk = Intel 510-series SSD, under AHCI on Windows XP SP3. Moving my FF cache to a MHDD did not improve things either, so it's not disk I/O which is was the cause.

I then tried Chrome. Holy *shit* that thing is fast, and I don't just mean loading pages -- I'm talking about interactivity/responsiveness within the browser (for keystrokes, mouse clicks, etc.) too. What I didn't like about Chrome: 1. tab-only (I do not like tabs, and have tried many times to use them but just cannot do it), 2. its lets-fork-a-new-process model (which is part of its original design from the very beginning) makes it very hard to tolerate when using Task Manager (yes I know Chrome has its own internal "manager" that can let you kill off a specific tab/page), 3. quite possibly the worst Configuration page/setup I've ever seen, with lots and lots of adjustments missing, and finally 4. a non-user-friendly bookmark interface (lots of Chrome users complain about this and state hands down that Firefox does this a lot better. The biggest ding against Chrome was when they removed the Bookmark button/icon so now you have to go through 3-4 clicks to expand your bookmarks). Back to Firefox I went...

The memory bloat problem in FF is real, but a lot of it has to do with how people use their browser. Most of my colleagues do insane shit like load up 20 tabs on launch and leave those open at all times. Who the fuck uses a computer like that? Oh, wait... well, I certainly don't. Many of those pages my colleagues load use Flash, lots of Javascript, etc.. One even loads 6-7 tabs filled with stock-ticker-esque pages; yeah, those are going to be real CPU and memory friendly. You can even see evidence of this here on Slashdot; "Who in the name of satan has 40 tabs open? *checks tabs* Guilty as charged m'lord". Stop abusing your computer!

As I see it, the biggest complaints about memory usage seem to be coming from a demographic of people who aren't using their system in a resource-friendly manner. People leave their browsers open for days, sometimes a full week. I'm a system administrator -- when I'm done with something, I close it. Same goes with memory management: when you're done with something, free() it. Folks over the years have tried hard to argue with me about this point ("no, a good garbage collector.........") -- all bullshit. Every GC on the planet is shit. Free memory when you're done with it, and use threads (preferably on an OS where userland threads map more or less 1:1 to a kernel thread, and use a programming language where this thread model exists (e.g. not Ruby!)) so that allocations can be freed when the thread ends. This isn't rocket science; KISS principle all the way.

It would greatly benefit everyone if they learned be a little more conscientious of how to use a computer in a resource-friendly way. Otherwise we're doing the exact thing that can never be achieved: trying to solve social problems (usage behaviour) with technology. It never works.

Surprisingly? No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome runs each tab in a separate process, this means the entire memory space of the browser is copied to each tab.

A browser that runs each tab as it's own thread never copies the memory space. Even if I run the 64-bit version of Firefox in parallel with 32-bit Chrome, on the same tabs, Chrome is chewing up 2-3x more memory. The only way we'll see an end to this is if Google heel-face-turn's on the "one tab, one process" ass backwards tabbing model.

I should mention that anything that crashes the main thread, crashes all the tabs anyways, so all that Google's engineers managed to do was make it so that you have more processes that can crash. I've been having nothing but this kind of crashing problem... where the main process pauses due to activity in the taskbar and stops responding for a minute or two. Only Chrome is doing this on Windows.

Maybe's Chrome's reached a tipping point of stupid innovations and it's time to go back to Firefox with it's more conservative memory usage.

MSIE isn't too bad, but it's always two steps behind Firefox.

What the summary did not include

[trifish]

The summary elegantly avoided the most important metric - Page Load Time. Ok, so let's see how we're doing there:

IE9 - fastest
Safari - 2nd
Chrome - 3rd
Firefox - 4th
Opera - 5th

The page load time tests are the same eight pages in our startup time tests: Google, YouTube, Yahoo!, Amazon, Wikipedia, craigslist, eBay, and Wikipedia.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-7-chrome-20-firefox-13-opera-12,3228-6.html

Re:Isn't IE embedded into the OS where possible

[icebraining]

Your knowledge is outdated. Firefox has separated plugins like Flash into their own processes using plugin-container multiple versions ago. You can kill the process without bringing Firefox down, and in fact I've done just that many times.

Re:who gives a fuck

[Surt]

firefox tools/options/advanced/update
But you may not be qualified to install firefox if you couldn't figure that out.

Re:Too bad for others

[Korin43]

For anyone who's actually interested, the Memshrink Blog is a fascinating account of how a team of developers have been reducing Firefox's memory usage. Interestingly, Firefox's memory usage has never been particularly bad (it just seems to be because web pages are so much more complicated), but addons have had horrible memory problems for a long time (and unfortunately, that's pretty hard to detect).

Re:Why IE9 did well

[bhcompy]

Because each IE tab is it's own instance(like Chrome). Each FF tab is under the parent process.

Re:Why IE9 did well

[icebike]

Yes in some cases it does apply to some GNU situations. Its just that there are very few browsers written into any other OS.

The size of KDE's built in browser, Konqueror, often could not be distinguished from the rest KDE because it was dependent on having so much else of KDE installed. Installing on top of Gnome pulled in a mountain of other packages. Even when Gnome had X, a window manger and all the same linux core libraries already installed.

So in your childish attempt to make a point you've only proven mine.

And the fact that you don't understand the difference between running an application under an operating system and running an application as PART of an operating system is pretty telling.

Memory is not the Firefox problem

[aussersterne]

Like others here, I have many gigabytes of RAM, so I'm not too concerned with the memory usage issue. Firefox is also good on speed; that doesn't bug me.

But I stopped using Firefox back when I was last a Linux user (ca. 2009) and have continued to use alternatives (Chrome and Safari, most notably) on OS X because Firefox suffers from too many WTF? moments. Whatever you call them—bugs, the results of Firefox's architecture, I don't care—they make Firefox a non-starter for me. For example:

(1) When using Firefox on OS X all window updates sometimes suddenly stop. Nothing is clickable, nothing is scrollable. The way around this is to drag the window—even just one pixel. After that, refreshes will return. That's bad if you have data auto-refreshing on a Firefox window you're monitoring. And it's not an OS X bug because only Mozilla applications (Firefox, Thunderbird) display this issue, and have done for the last umpteen versions. (For the record, this happend both on my older Mac desktop and on my new unibody MBP.)

(2) The UI still sucks more than any other browser. Widgets and graphical elements misaligned from their active (i.e. clickable) zones, tearing and refresh issues for stateful widgets, etc. The point of the UI is to metaphorically embody what's going on in the code. Once the UI no longer reflects program state, you basically can't talk to your program.

(3) Crashes. Firefox remains the most crash-happy of the browsers. It does this at random. My last crash-followed-by-bug-reporting window was yesterday, when I fired up the latest version of FF for OS X to survey the meta titles of a bunch of pages rapidly. (My biggest complaint about Chrome is the absence of the meta title in the title bar.) About 10 minutes in, FF crashed. My uptime is measured in months right now, and I've had instances of Chrome up for that long. With FF I'm lucky if I get two days.

(4) Graphical appearance. It's damned hard to find a nice, professional FF theme that looks minimal. I just want something that has the same ethos as Chrome or Safari: simple widgets, no cruft, all of a cloth, that integrate well with the OS appearance. There are dozens of FF themes and "personalities" but all of them have that same "I'm OSS!" appearance that KDE also suffers from.

If Firefox were to stop sucking on these points, I'd give it another look regardless of memory use. But it's been a lot of releases since 2009 and though I keep the latest version of FF installed for cross-browser testing, I haven't seen any improvement on these points that would make me want to switch for my general browsing needs.

Re:Firefox throwing out the baby with the bath wat

[HockeyPuck]

It gets worse when you quit FF, and then reopen the app and have it reload your last session. It will create the tabs, but it won't load the page until you activate the tab. Now this is something I'd be willing to tolerate for tabs that have been open for a few weeks. But not for tabs that I've created recently and/or activate frequently.

1. Go into Options,
2. On the Startup box, there's an option "Don't Load Tabs Until Selected"

3. Uncheck it.

Now it will load all the tabs at startup.

Re:You know, I really don't care

[Wordplay]

I'm a little confused. I'm on latest Lion. Just killed Firefox. Restarted it. There are my tabs. As far as I know it should work for you.

I work for Mozilla QA. If you want to talk about this more, you can contact me at gmealer@mozilla.com (my name is Geo) and I'll either help you out or direct you to someone who can.

Re:Why IE9 did well

[dgatwood]

IE is a better browser than it used to be, but it started out so far behind that they're going to be catching up for a while yet.

For example, their DOM selection range support is still way behind, as is their memory management. (It is absolutely unacceptable to tell JavaScript coders that they should not add methods to an element or they'll cause memory leaks. I mean, really!?!)

And IE still has fascinatingly severe bugs. For example, create a trivial HTML page that uses Javascript to set the src property of an existing iframe to the same URL as the loading page, and none of the JavaScript scripts on the second page ever run. (IE 9) The only robust workaround I've found is to replace the iframe with a new element. That workaround, in turn, when combined with IE's hack where they dispose of the DOM tree for an iframe's contents when the iframe is detached even if parts of it are still in use by JavaScript code (their hack "fix" for the aforementioned memory leaks) led to hours of extra debugging for me. (Wait, how can contentDocument.body legally be null?)

And it is fairly easy to wedge things using its development pane. And its contentEditable support is seriously subpar. (You can't easily select content that spans a div boundary, for example.) And it caches XHR requests when other browsers don't, which caused me lots of headaches (though admittedly I should have been sending appropriate headers to begin with).

Even in its current, much-improved state, IE is still a plague. If they keep up this level of improvement, it might be a viable browser for the website I'm developing in 5 years. As it is, I'm going to support Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, but I have no plans to support IE at this time. It just isn't feasible to work around all the bugs—even in IE 9. We'll see about IE 10, but I'm not holding my breath.