This morning I decided to test drive Firefox 3. There was a lot of hype about the release of Firefox 3—that it would greatly improve performance, reduce memory usage, improve usability, enhance your sex life, et c.—so I was excited to test it out.
The following tests were performed on healthy copies of Firefox 3 and Opera 9. This is not a strict benchmark test; your experience may be different.
| Action | Memory usage (mb) | Comment | |
| Firefox 3 | Opera 9 | ||
| Run browser; stare at blank page for a few moments | 31 | 14 | OK, Firefox 3 has already claimed the equivalent of an instance of Quake 2. This is supremely counter-intuitive, but, much like hiked gas prices, I’m used to it. Opera’s usage is about half that of Firefox’s. |
| Minimize browser; come back 5 minutes later | 35 | 14 | I did not even touch Firefox and it decides to claim another 4 megabytes of memory. Maybe Mozilla has adopted a boot up strategy a la Windows? OK. |
| Visit plain google.com (not iGoogle) | 53 | 17 | Firefox claims another 18 mb. Keep in mind the complete source for www.google.com including markup, images, scripts, et c. amounts to just over 8 kb. I understand there is a lot of behind the scenes activity in a browser—caching, management of cookies, uncompressing markup, storing and blitting images, DOM upkeep, script parsing and execution, et c.—but what is Firefox doing that Opera isn’t? |
| Open a new tab | 54 | 17 | Good! |
| Close google.com tab | 54 | 17 | Also counter-intuitive, but I’m guessing it’s the phenotype of a performance heuristic: If the user is opening tabs, chances are s/he will open one again, so don’t waste time deallocating if we’re probably going to reallocate. |
| Visit facebook.com (home page, not logged in) | 59 | 24 | OK. Not bad. |
| Login to Facebook | 71 | 37 | Facebook has a pretty intensive front end. Lots of JavaScript, XHR, images, styling. 71 mb is better than FF2 probably, but, again, how is it that Opera is doing the same thing with half the memory? |
These tests were performed slowly with plenty of time in between each action. How about a “real life” example?
Practical test: Open browser; rapid fire load Google News, MySpace, and Facebook in their own tabs; as pages are loading, click a news article, tab over & login to MySpace, tab over & login to Facebook; visit someone’s Facebook profile.
Practical results: Firefox 3, 89 mb; Opera 9, 51 mb
(Personal) conclusion: I admire and appreciate the Mozilla dev team’s efforts in reducing Firefox’s memory footprint. But the question still remains: WTF is going on in Firefox that makes it use roughly double the amount of memory that Opera uses? I’d be willing to accept this if there were a palpable performance benefit in Firefox, but it’s not there! In fact, to me, Opera 9 feels more responsive and quicker overall than Firefox except in certain edge cases, e.g., Google Maps, Gmail, or anything with really intensive JavaScript. These cases along with Opera’s lack of a Firebug equivalent are the sole reasons why I haven’t completely switched over to Opera.
dragonfly.opera.com …
Posted by jon on June 19th, 2008.
opera is my jam
Posted by kelbelle on June 19th, 2008.
this isn’t right ok i use both of opera n firefox on vista ultimate and for me opera is better and faster but it uses more memory usage but still ok
Posted by unknown on July 14th, 2008.
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Posted by » I falsi miti di Firefox Sciambola! on January 5th, 2009.
Opera 7.6 had serious memory problems, but they fixed it since then. Maybe we have to wait until Firefox 5. And also Opera is doing so many things that Firefox isn’t, such as user javascript, going through server manager, etc.
Posted by Grease on March 15th, 2009.
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Posted by Firefox Mitleri - 2 | Z@H3K OPERA BLOG™ on May 10th, 2009.
I agree. Firefox is a serious memory hogger and always tops my list of memory intensive programs, even right now…its’ taking up close to 130mb.
Posted by Aakash on August 22nd, 2009.
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Posted by Firefox ile ilgili yanıldıklarımız | Rapid-Download on September 15th, 2009.