Firefox 3 Beta 4 eats less memory than IE8b and Opera!
In our recent coverage of the Firefox 3 beta releases (1, 2, 3, 4), we have noted performance improvements and a significant reduction in memory consumption relative to Firefox 2. The enormous amount of effort that developers invested in boosting resource efficiency for Firefox 3 has paid off, and the results are very apparent during day-to-day use.
During intensive browsing with approximately 50 tabs, I have found that Firefox 3 generally consumes less than half of the memory used by Firefox 2.0.0.12. Firefox 3 is also snappier and more responsive when switching between tabs and performing other operations that typically lag in Firefox 2.0.0.12 when the browser is experiencing heavy load.
Mozilla developer Stuart Parmenter has written an overview of the tactics that were used to reduce Firefox’s memory footprint and also reveals the results of a memory benchmark he performed to compare Firefox 3 with other browsers. The memory benchmark, which uses the Talos framework and was conducted on Windows Vista, replicates real-world usage patterns by automatically cycling pages through browser windows and then closing them. Firefox 3 used less memory than Firefox 2, Internet Explorer, and Opera, and it also freed more memory than the other browsers when pages were closed. Safari 3 and Internet Explorer 8 could not be benchmarked because they crashed during the test.
Filed under: Computer Software
