gluxon

Firefox does not use that Much Memory

gluxon - 12-10-2010 - 17:28:07

There seems to be a belief floating around that Firefox uses a lot of RAM memory, and has major memory leaking problems. I am here to prove that this idea is superstition with facts.

Let's start with the consumer definition "Memory Leak". A memory leak, occurs when a program does not release memory it no longer needs back to the operating system. This does not mean any unwanted, high quantities of memory a program will consume. I can not say for sure Firefox does not have this problem, but I can say a large scale problem like this would be marked as critical on bugzilla, and fixed immidiately. We'll conduct a test later just to be sure.

The more tabs you have open, the more memory a browser will consume. There is no way to prevent this, just like how there's no way to prevent your bags from filling up as you stuff it with more items. Different web pages will consume different amounts of resources and memory depending on complexity. It's not fair to say either browser uses more memory unless they're running the same page(s).

In the modern day world, your web browser is the most used tool you will have on your desktop. It will, as a result, stick out and take up much more memory compared to the other processes you see in your system moniter.

Google Chrome has a feature called out-of-process tabs, which separates each tab into different processes, allowing the browser to refrain from crashing if one web site crashes. This is probably a big reason why people believe Firefox uses more memory compared to its competitiors. They don't count up all the memory from the Chrome's processes.

Let's conduct a test. For this, we're going to have both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome open up the Google homepage, the Mozilla homepage, and the gluxon homepage. Both browsers will be run with their default settings.

Below are the results

1. 28.8 MB
2. 37 MB
3. 25.4 MB
4. 13.7 MB
5. 732 KB
6. 12.8 MB
7. 18.7 MB

1. 60.5 MB

When totaling Google Chrome's results, you get 151.17 MB, compared to Firefox's 60.5 MB

At first, looking at Firefox's 60.5 MB of RAM seems like a lot, but when comparing it to Chrome, it's almost nothing. It only seems like a lot since chrome is divided and each chrome process is less than half of Firefox's 1 process.

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