Firefox 3 proved to be best memory friendly browser ever

[Guest Krawk Islander]

Real world testing of five web browsers under Windows has shown that Firefox 3 hung onto much less working-set memory after almost three hours of typical web-surfing.

 

The browsers tested included Safari 3.1.2, Firefox 3.0, Flock 1.2.2 (a Firefox 2 derivative), Opera 9.5 and Internet Explorer 8.0 Beta 1. The benchmark testing process used a custom .NET application that recorded memory usage every three seconds, creating millions of data points collected over 14 hours of combined web-surfing time.

 

Each browser was tested in a separate web-surfing session that lasted between 2.69 and 2.91 hours with brief periods of inactivity. The testbed computer had over 3GB of RAM and was running Windows Vista SP1. An ordinary complement of plugins was used with each browser, and reportedly included things like Flash, Acrobat Reader and Java, although the last two were said not thought to have been exercised. The tester reported that he accessed "just regular stuff" sites including Gmail, not many pages with large images or any browser benchmark web pages, with no more than about four windows open in each web browser and with no more than three tabs open in each window.

 

Over time, the Safari and Internet Explorer web browsers produced memory working-sets that steadily increased in size, while the Firefox 3, Flock and Opera web browsers exhibited memory working-sets that stabilized and more-or-less leveled off. Real memory available on the testbed computer wasn't exhausted by the testing performed on any of the browsers, but one might conjecture that Safari and Internet Explorer might have eventually consumed all available real memory if the testing had been continued long enough.

 

The final memory working-set sizes reported were: Safari - 636.9MB, Firefox 3 - 111.8MB, Flock - 191.9MB, Opera - 190.6MB, and Internet Explorer - 194.4MB.

 

Safari was proven to be the worst memory friendly browser. Does this mean that Internet Explorer 8 is going to be better than Safari, in memory usage? We'll see.

 

For now, Firefox 3 reigns.

[antiaircraft]

Whoa - I'm a Firefox developer and I didn't know about this! Shows how much I pay attention these days. :P

 

But anyway, it's interesting to see that we finally outdid Opera in terms of memory efficiency. XD Last time I heard, the Opera 9.50 beta was still ahead of us.

[crystal]

Very nice.

I wish they could have done testings on older computers though. Not everyone's computer is new, or using Vista. (Like me.) Wonder if it'd make any difference with an older computer...

[antiaircraft]

In theory, running the tests on an older computer would have produced the same results. It's just that overall all the browsers would run slower. In practice there are all sorts of little factors that affect the memory usage of programs on different machines, so it's quite likely that the results would be different on an older computer. :yes: