I am actually a heavy tab user, usually every time I am browsing the Internet, I opened average 10 tabs and maybe more. My desktop PC is running on 2.66Ghz Pentium 4 which is quite slow for a heavy tab user like me. I’ve tested a lot of browsers that doesn’t require a lot of resources even when opening lots of tabs. So far, I found that Flock 1.2.1 is very suitable for me. Flock is a browser with Web 2.0 features, built on Firefox. Flock 1.2.1 is based on Firefox 2.

However, today I decided to run a test to see the actual memory requirement for a few popular browsers. The test was run on Windows Vista Ultimate Service Pack 1. The browser that I tested are:

Mozilla Firefox 2

Mozilla Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2

Flock 1.2.1

Flock 2.0 pre alpha 1212931210.19254

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7

Opera 9.27

Opera 9.50 snapshot 10051

NOTE: Please don’t assume that the results below are accurate. Results may vary on different operating systems and configurations.

All of the browsers are freshly installed with default configuration without any add-ons, extensions or widgets. For Internet Explorer, I’ve restored the factory setting via Control Panel. Before the test begin, the browsers are checked at this site to make sure they can play and view websites with flash and shockwave. Most of the websites that I run the test contain flash. You can download the bookmark at the end of this post. I use Process Explorer to measure the memory usage, and Windows Task Manager of course. The memory usage shown in Process Explorer (the left dialog in the screenshots below) are the total of Working Set Private, Shareable and Shared while in the Task Manager (the dialog on the right), only the Working Set Private is shown.

The memory usage on startup with a blank startup page:

Mozilla Firefox 2

Mozilla Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2

Flock 1.2.1

Flock 2.0 pre alpha 1212931210.19254

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7

Opera 9.27

Opera 9.50 snapshot 10051

As we can see, Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7 and Opera 9.27 uses the least memory at their startups. Maybe because they are the final production version. As for Flock 1.2.1, I think it is because the additional functions and features that integrated into it causes the memory usage to increase compared with Firefox 2 even though Flock 1.2.1 is based on Firefox 3. Flock 2.0 pre alpha 1 uses the most memory on startup.

Ok, lets move to the next test. This test involves opening the browsers with two windows, and in each window 20 tabs of different websites are opened. You can download the bookmark file at the end of this post if you want to know what websites that I use in this test. Most of the websites contain flah, AJAX and (quite) heavy multimedia. Results:

Mozilla Firefox 2

Notes: Moving between tabs (CTRL tab and CTRL shift tab) are smooth. Web scrolling also smooth.

Mozilla Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2

Notes: Web scrolling is ok except sluggish at http://tv.yahoo.com/ and http://movies.yahoo.com/. Moving between tabs is smooth.

Flock 1.2.1

Notes: Web scrolling is smooth. Tabs sometimes unresponsive and lag.

Flock 2.0 pre alpha 1212931210.19254

Notes: Problem when checking flash and shockwave plugin so that step was skipped. Web scrolling is ok but sluggish at http://tv.yahoo.com/ and http://movies.yahoo.com/. Moving between tabs is ok, but sometimes lag and not very responsive

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7

Notes: moving between tabs are very sluggish. Web scrolling is quite ok but sometimes not very smooth.

Opera 9.27

Notes: Scrolling is smooth but tabs sometimes unresponsive.

Opera 9.50 snapshot 10051

Notes: Moving between tabs and web scrolling are smooth.

3 browsers that use the least memory are Opera 9.27, Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2 and Flock 2.0 pre alpha 1. Seems that browsers built with Firefox 3 show significant decrease in memory usage while browsing (we are talking about 40 tabs and pages with multimedia content). The worst memory usage is Internet Explorer with more than 780MB. As for Opera 9.50 snapshot 10051, I don’t think the browser’s memory usage is optimized yet (I use the snapshot version, not the Opera 9.50 beta 2).

Another thing that I found is Opera 9.27 is not multiprocessor aware, means that it will use only 1 core on system multi core CPU. I don’t know if I missed any configuration. Opera is actually my favorite browser since the dial-up era before I moved to Phoenix (Firefox) and Flock.

Summary

Firefox 3 shows better memory usage compared with Firefox 2. Browser based on Firefox 3 (in this case, Flock 2) also shows reduction in memory usage.

What is your current web browser? How is your browser performance when opening many tabs?

[Download (Firefox exported bookmark): Bookmark] [Flock testing download] [Firefox] [Firefox Builds Forum] [Flock] [Opera Snapshot] [Opera]