Firefox 3.5 and memory usage.

I came across an article while searching for news regarding firefox 3.5. I've been very excited about the new mozilla release so its been on my watch list. I stumbled upon an article from an author who decided to test each of the new browser's memory consumption. Well, i'll tell you what: I made a very bold claim in my last post that memory usage in firefox has been poor. This goes to show the world that when you make statements like these, you need to have facts to back them up with... So here are the facts:



Chrome is Yellow/orange
Opera is Green
Safari is Blue
Firefox is Red

...In a single word: huh?!

This image was publish thanks to what seems to be a very standardized test that a fellow at dotnetperls.com did. What the author did was open up the top 150 URLs (as of 19 Jun reported by alexa) into tabs of each browser using a hand made CLI. He took memory tabulations every 3 seconds for each browser, and after opening 30 tabs, closed them down to 1 tab and repeated the process with 30 new URLs. Each new URL was opened after a short random time frame (not sure why, maybe to to let pages load?).

IE8 was excluded from the test because the author couldn't open URLs in a tab directly (they appeared in a new windows instead) which is a bummer... It would be nice to see how IE8 played out to see what it brings to the table.

This test method mimics some seriously intense browsing, and its kinda realistic too... we might not open 30 tabs at once, but the concept is the same: We start with one URL, and branch from it, usually to another tab... we gather a set of tabs, and then close them down and start over. The only things that different is the time frame and the sites we look at. But this is inaccurate, becuase he uses the top 150 sites. The time thing is probably not important. I can't see memory leaking after each passing second. Another thing that different is add-ons... and this is why I'm starting to think firefox has become such a memory hog: the Add-on developers are writing bad code... But Suprisingly:

Firefox 3.5 RC2 had the lowest memory use all together.

It had the lowest max consumed, Lowest average consumed and the lowest tally at the end. Chrome ended using 3 more megs than firefox in the final tally, but peaked at 1216 megs (the system was winxp 32 with 4 gigs). Im guessing thats why chrome appears so fast as it looks to cache anything/everything... that fact that its javascript speed is a third of firefox 3.5 probably doesn't hold up so much now. The way i see it, nothing is faster than reading from ram. So if firefox is caching to the HDD, and not to memory, and chrome is caching to memory... chrome will always be quicker, at the expense of memory consumption. We can also see that firefox and chome don't "leak' over time, and both do a fantasitic job of cleaning up the memory mess.

I ended this post using firefox 3.0.11 using 80464K (78.6 megs) of memory. Im also using 15 add-ons.