In the first post, we took a look at the memory usage between Firefox, IE9, Chrome, Safari — and the oddball, Outlook — on Windows 7 32-bit. However, I only had one tab open in each browser, so it wasn’t a very good test. I should also note: this time around, I’m using Windows 7 64-bit.
So for test #2, we’re opening eight tabs in each browser! And we’re getting rid of Safari and Outlook, because frankly — who cares? To be fair, I opened the same websites in each browser, which were:
- ESPN
- download.com
- eBay
- Lifehacker
- ign.com
- Wikipedia
So will Firefox remain the king of bloat, as we saw the first time around? Or will it be succeeded by a surly rival?
OK, you’re sick of drama. Without further ado, here is the memory usage of each browser, all of them running with eight tabs open for about 15 minutes:
The facts:
- Firefox used 197,812 KB or 263,412 KB (193 MB – 257 MB), depending if you count the plugin-container.exe that it seemed to spawn (when I killed Firefox, it went away).
- Internet Explorer 9 gobbled up 419,568 KB (410 MB) (!) when running with eight tabs open.
- Chrome consumed 300,572 KB (294 MB)
My, how the tables have turned! The trend reverses, and IE9 becomes the memory hog, and Firefox becomes the most “lean” by a long shot!
Contrast this to the chart from Part 1 (remember, this was 32-bit Windows):
So what does this mean? One of two things:
- Browser memory usage is wildly different on 32-bit Windows vs. 64-bit Windows
- Firefox is much more efficient when the amount of tabs increases
I’ll let you draw your own conclusions! If I do another test, I should definitely stick to either 32-bit or 64-bit, to remove that variable. What do you think? Has your experience of the browsers’ memory usage been consistent with my test, or different?
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We would appreciate it if you would run Win7 32 bit with multiple windows open and compare the big three. I have 64 bit and my friend has 32 bit and she has a lot more issues with overloading than I do.
As a note, she and I are generally running 10-40 tabs open at a time.
Hi I think you should open 10 – 15 tabs atleast and see the results shoot up significantly. Also it is better to do this test with 32 bit windows first (compare windows vista vs windows 7) and see who fares better .. then go on to 64 bit as a wide majority of machines are still using 32 bit OS.
Firefox (now in version 11 and soon to be 12) is still a big memory hog .. but i suspect is also because sites like facebook are DESIGNED to be memory hogs … opening 3-4 tabs of facebook can often bring the computer to a crawling halt esp if you have anything less than 2 GB of RAM ..