Firefox vs IE memory usage
Posted by Aaron Paxson on March 13, 2008
Being the Network Operations Manager, one of my duties is to decide on policies and standardization across the Desktop and Server infrastructure. For the longest time, I’ve had to weigh and determine whether we should drop IE and move to Firefox.
Why the hard decisions? Well, although Firefox is certainly more secure (and more productive to use in my opinion), the fact remains that many 3rd-party companies are still designing applications to the IE spec. I won’t go into detail why that is wrong in around 100-different ways. The fact is, we must keep IE.
However, I do encourage users to try Firefox, and use it if they can. The only downside it has had, was the huge memory usage it would take. The more tabs and windows you used, and the longer it sat, the more memory it would use.
Apparently, that has changed, according to some tests prominently displayed and explained on Pavlov.net’s blog.
They tested three different browsers. IE7, Firefox2, and Firefox3-beta. The results were shocking to me. Basically, they opened 30 webpages, each using their own window, and did that 11 times. Each window that was opened, closes the other window. At the end, the last window remained opened, and they let the browser sit awhile.
Check out these results (blatently taken from Pavlov’s site):
This shows that not only has Firefox3 have BETTER memory management than it’s predecessor, but check out IE7!! It didn’t even reclaim the used space of all those windows after sitting!!
This is proof in the pudding! Not only does IE SUCK at CSS, but it also SUCKS at memory usage. No wonder why Vista has such steep memory requirements! It’s not for the eye-candy, or advanced graphics and tools. It’s to keep browsing the internet!!!
Here’s the link to the article, in case you missed it above:
May 2, 2008 at 11:47 pm
I tend to use IETab for certain clients that require IE to run certain applications such as ActiveX based among other things. Basically it allows you to set certain pages to load IE inside of Firefox such as WindowsUpdate.