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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.
It is interesting that IE uses 1276 MB for 40 tabs, so 1276/40 = 31.9 MB/tab, while with only one tab open it takes 31 MB, i.e. there seems to be no memory overhead for the software itself. For comparison, Firefox uses 794 MB for 40 tabs, so 19.85 MB/tab, and 61 MB when there is only one tab open, so an overhead 41 MB for the software itself.
What I care about in a browser is (in order of importance) security, compatibility, reliability, speed.
I stopped examining RAM usage of any software since the time I bought 16GB of RAM for practically no money.
Even before, when I had "only" 4GB of RAM, I had swap file turned off for years and I haven't seen a single "Insufficient RAM" error.
This obsession with memory use is wrecking Firefox. Chrome is much, much faster and I prefer to trade memory for performance.
Firefox does stupid things like delaying image decoding until the image is on screen, making the whole browser stutter like crazy. I turn that off because the reason my computer has lots of ram is to avoid that. Can't they even detect when you have lots of free RAM and make use of it? Of course not, that would make FF look bad in pointless benchmarks.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
while with only one tab open it takes 31 MB, i.e. there seems to be no memory overhead for the software itself
Which is exactly what the GP was saying: that any browser written into a specific OS can use the facilities of the OS itself to mask its true size.
Its sort of like measuring the memory impact of the Chrome browser running on a Chrome-OS tablet.
But disregarding memory utilization by the browser itself, your numbers are pretty interesting all by themselves.
What the heck is IE doing with that extra 11meg per tab when there are multiple tabs open? The web page itself is only the size that it is, and presumably the tests all loaded the same pages in the same order. 11meg is a pretty good guess for the average size of pages. Its almost as if IE build a page in the background and handing the whole thing to the render engine while keeping a copy as backup.
I wonder if the tests were run in a memory constrained machine? The idea that unused ram is wasted ram might lead some of these developer to use what is available more or less freely depending on available ram.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I love Firefox, but it's still about 50% faster on Windows 7 than on Linux. Chrome wins clearly on Linux. I agree that on Windows they're comparable.
The recent improvements in FF memory usage have some severe drawbacks. FF will throw away images in background tabs, and reload them when you switch to the tab. But the reason I load new pages in background tabs is that I don't want to wait for the page to load and be rendered.
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.
I also notice that FF memory usage steadily increases over a couple of days, while the number of tabs remains roughly constant.
In other words, they have reduced the memory footprint not by tackling whatever process is hoarding memory like Scrat stacking acorns in his giant hollow tree, but by throwing away items that use memory but are otherwise static (images).