Ninth Anniversary of Firefox 1.0 Release
Nine years ago today, Firefox 1.0 was released. Mozilla writes "Mozilla created Firefox to be an amazingly fun, safe, and fast Web browser that embodies the values of our mission to promote openness, innovation and opportunity online. In the nine years since we first launched Firefox, we have moved and shaped the Web into the most valuable public resource of our time."
The first release of the little project to write a lighter alternative to Seamonkey is a bit over a year older.
The difference is Google pay Mozilla to be number one in the search box and, I believe, when people use the search box whereas Chrome begs you to login with your Google account so it can link every god damn thing you do in your browser with your account. Google didn't make Chrome for any other reason than it gets them more and more data. Same reason they made Android and Google+ and Gmail.
I'd say waaaaaay beyond a slight edge thanks to the memshrink project.
https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/memshrink/
Old measurements. Situation keeps improving. Latest 2 or 3 firefox versions use smart loading/unloading of large images on image heavy web pages, for example.
http://www.itworld.com/sites/default/files/figure3_browserfootprint.jpg
Personally, on my chromebook, Chrome used 615MiB w/ 2 tabs open (crosh and a blank tab) while Firefox in Crouton used 385MiB with 18 tabs open, and that was after I had cycled through all the tabs to make sure they hadn't been unloaded.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'