Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 was recently made available for download and as we covered in the last report, it brings quite a lot of news and optimizations. We were a bit curious to see how much memory Firefox 3 devours. Firefox has since the first release been a bit of a memory hog and there’s more than a few people who have cursed the memory usage. In a hardware blog over at ZDnet they’ve published a short test where they’ve compared FF 3.0 Beta 1 to today’s Firefox 2.0.0.9 and the results are quite interesting.
At low usage, I.e. (no pun intended) with few tabs, Firefox 3.0 consumes a bit more than the current version. With five tabs, FF3.0 consumes 38 MB of RAM, while FF2.0 settles for 35 MB.
When they opened up 12 tabs and let it rest for 5 minutes things started to happen. FF2.0 grabbed a whopping 103 MB, while FF3.0 needed just 63 MB. A quite significant difference where the same test with Internet Explorer 7.0 ended up 89 MB being consumed.
“This is interesting. Initially it seemed that Firefox 3.0 beta 1 was consuming more memory than 2.0.0.9, but during the twelve page test I started seeing what I’ve been seeing before – spiraling memory consumption when the browser is under significant load. I’m certain that if the browser had been left open longer, memory usage would have continued to rise. I didn’t see much signs of Firefox 3.0 beta 1 doing this.”
If this correlates with the final version, Mozilla has really managed to pull through and make Firefox 3.0 a lot more memory friendly, something many of us will appreciate.
