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

Why IE9 did well

[Stonent1]

Because the browser is part of the OS, the RAM is already in use as part of the windows explorer.

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.

Performance improvements

[jaak]

Interestingly enough, the Tom's Hardware pages-per-article benchmark shows that Firefox can now handle an article spread over twice as many pages as before!

40 tabs?

[trancemission]

Who in the name of satan has 40 tabs open?!?

*checks tabs*

Guilty as charged m'lord..........

Your opinion may differ

[trifish]

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.

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:What the summary did not include

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there anything of value to comment on when the page load times are so close to each other on all the browsers excepting the last? The first 4 finishers range from 880ms to 947ms, which is less than a 10% differential across 8 websites. I doubt you'd notice any difference in your day-to-day real life browsing with respect to page load times.

Re:more information on firefox

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:who gives a fuck

[NotBorg]

Why "enterprises" can't customize open source software is a bit of a mystery to me. Interns really are cheap these days (esp. by $$$ enterprise $$$ standards). Seriously enterprise customers want a browser specifically tailored to their needs for absolutely nothing. It's funny.

Auto updates can be turned off both at compile time option and as an installed option. It's never been easier to bring in a custom patch set and build software and yet they're still bitch'n. They don't even have to pay a fucking license fee but act as if they're paying customers. They act like they dished out thousands of dollars for support like they do for their Oracle database software or Microsoft servers. They'll pay MS and Oracle per processor/core for less customization but when it comes to Mozilla they expect $0.00 to get them everything.

Enterprise babies need to grow up and L2.

Re:more information on firefox

[hackertourist]

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 should not need to do that. Quit trying to force me to adapt to the machine instead of the other way round. This isn't a Sinclair Spectrum, it should be able to handle 40 tabs without crashing or filling up all my RAM.