Firefox Wins Real World Memory Usage Test
Much ado about browser benchmarks lately.
With the release of Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5 in recent weeks, and with Safari 3.1 just three months old, the cheerleaders for each browser continue to cite statistics and studies claiming one browser is faster and uses less memory than the others. There aren’t too many evangelists coming to the defense of Internet Explorer 7 in the speed and memory usage categories, but those are races where Microsoft hasn’t finished on the podium in a while.
DotNetPerls blogger Sam Allen ran a 14-hour real world browsing test to see which browser stood up best to the dreaded memory leak. He put Firefox 3 up against Safari 3.1, beta 1 of IE 8, Flock and Opera 9.5 on a Windows Vista machine.
In his tests — which involved not just loading pages, but actual user interactions like clicking buttons and waiting for responses — he found Firefox 3 to be a clear winner, using about 60% of the memory of IE 8, Flock and Opera. Safari on Windows was off the map, using close to six times the memory of Firefox 3. Granted, Allen makes clear that his test is not scientific since he used different sites to test each different browser. But his tests do reflect some real-world performance scenarios that users would put their browsers through on a day-to-day basis.
Perhaps most striking is how horribly Safari on Windows performed. How long until Apple corrects its wrongs in that department?
That’s all memory usage — if you want to test your own browser’s speed, try the Webmonkey Stopwatch. And if you’re tired of reading all these reports about leaks, maybe you’d be interested in learning how to fix them yourself.
