Firefox 3 May Be More Memory Efficient Than Either IE or Opera

Edy52285 writes "Ars Technica has an article showing benchmarks pitting Firefox 3 Beta 4 against other browsers. Contenders include IE7, Firefox 2, Opera 9.5 Beta, and Safari 3.0.4 Beta. The piece includes a graph depicting FF3's memory usage well below that of the other browsers. The in-testing browser even trumps Opera, which has long been regarded as the fastest browser around."

Scale?

[frp001 (227227)]

I just love this when someone provides a graph without even a detailed scale!

going to karma hell for this one...

[3-State Bit (225583)]

The drop-off you see near the end of the graph is where both versions of Firefox crash. I'm excited, because unlike the old version, this now actually really helps reduce its memory usage. [arstechnica.com]

It's not the average speed that matters

[goombah99 (560566)]

While I know you were making a joke youre point was actually insightful. Namely the browser speed wars is something of a game of leapfrog. Any browser that is reasonably fast is a good browsers. But what matters is that the browser maker keeps the browser among the best at all time.

That is to say if every 3 years browser X gets a big update and becomes the fastest for a few months and then gets severely eclipsed for 2 years. it's not the best browser.

Speaking of Karma hell, a good example of this is Thunderbird email which occasionally shines but then goes and wnaders in the woods for years at a time

Re:It's not the average speed that matters

[whackco (599646)]

Ok, just because a program uses LESS memory doesn't make it faster or slower. In fact, the more memory it uses to cache more, the less disk thrashing generally, and the faster experience.

This is also a common misconception in Vista's memory management. It fills the empty space in memory with things 'pre-fetched' for faster loading, etc. I like it, and it works well for me.

Jezz Slashdot - I expected more from the worlds largest concentration of geek power.

Re:Crash

[CastrTroy (595695)]

Firefox 2 lets you reopen closed tabs, so I imagine that Firefox 3 would also have that functionality.

I knew IE7 was bad, but...

[TripMaster Monkey (862126)]

It's one thing to know that IE7 is a resource hog, but another thing entirely to view the graph in the article and be confronted with hard evidence of just how abysmal it is.

I'm going to print out that graph and put it on my wall. Then, when my users come to me and ask why our enterprise isn't rolling out IE7 on our systems, I can just point to it.

Re:I knew IE7 was bad, but...

[by Anonymous Coward]

It's one thing to know that IE7 is a resource hog, but another thing entirely to view the graph in the article and be confronted with hard evidence of just how abysmal it is.

I'm going to print out that graph and put it on my wall. Then, when my users come to me and ask why our enterprise isn't rolling out IE7 on our systems, I can just point to it.

As a web developer, I beg you, please install IE7 anyway. It's better standards support (far from being as good as gecko/webkit/khtml/opera, but still a massive improvement over IE6), support for alpha transparency, etc, makes things so much easier for us.

Re:I knew IE7 was bad, but...

[Joebert (946227)]

I bet you get at least one user who thinks they're smart trying to argue that even the poster on your wall says IE7 is better than the other browsers.

Re:I knew IE7 was bad, but...

[TripMaster Monkey (862126)]

I don't doubt it...after all, it's already happened here [slashdot.org]. ^_^

Re:I knew IE7 was bad, but...

[gravis777 (123605)]

,I am not exactly sure what this graph is showing. I have NEVER had IE7 take up 500 meg of Ram. Shoot, with multiple windows and videos open, I have never had it top 100. I am running it now in Vista, and it is using under 25 meg of ram. Firefox 2.0.12 is using 22 meg of Ram. Yeah, Firefox is using less, but I am seeing no where near the performance difference that they are showing on the graph. Maybe TFA might share some insight.

During intensive browsing with approximately 50 tabs, I have found that Firefox 3 generally consumes less than half of the memory used by Firefox 2.0.0.12.

I have never had 50 tabs open at once. I think my limit has been around 20, but I usually do not average more than 5. 50, for real? Does not sound like a real world test to me.

The memory benchmark, which uses the Talos framework and was conducted on Windows Vista, replicates real-world usage patterns by automatically cycling pages through browser windows and then closing them. Firefox 3 used less memory than Firefox 2, Internet Explorer, and Opera, and it also freed more memory than the other browsers when pages were closed. Safari 3 and Internet Explorer 8 could not be benchmarked because they crashed during the test.

Once again, I have NEVER had IE7 use as much ram as they are claiming under Vista. I have to question the "replicates real-world usage patterns" thing.

Re:I knew IE7 was bad, but...

[Knuckles (8964)]

Along that vein; be advised that notepad has a VERY small footprint.

you seem to be inferring that feature-wise, IE7 is better then FF3. Care to elaborate?

It make your penis bigger and harder!

[aliquis (678370)]

It goes something like this:

IE > exploit > botnet > spam > viagra and penis enlargement sales > "you".

Re:I knew IE7 was bad, but...

[snoyberg (787126)]

No, I think he was saying that it's better than IE6. The original question (from his users) was why not to migrate from IE6 to IE7. And I think, feature-wise, IE7 *does* beat IE6.

A Blessing!

[Ngarrang (1023425)]

Firefox 3 will certainly be a blessing to my company if this holds up through official release. My company is standardized on Firefox for all web browsing and intranet apps. Our PCs are not necessarily cutting edge technology filled with copious amounts of RAM. The average speed is 1GHz and 512Mb RAM running XP. Now if only all apps took the route of less/improved memory usage with each new version instead of the bloat I am suffering with Microsoft Word, Citrix, etc.

Re:A Blessing!

[twistedsymphony (956982)]

This is one of the greatest selling points to open source software IMO.

When you have a product like MS Office, every year that they release a new version they have to load it up with new features to encourage people to buy it, despite the fact that most users only use a fraction of the feature set and rarely need any of the new features the new version offers. This can be applied to most for profit software.

When you have a product like Open Office it's being developed by people who are working more for their affinity for the software rather than a paycheck. The result here is that unneeded features are left out of the core application and once there is a solid interface and feature set they start turning towards making the product more stable and more efficient.

Of course there are exceptions on both sides of the fence, but this is something I've noticed with most of the OSS that I use. By running nearly all OSS alternatives I'm able to use the latest versions of my most common apps on my old P3 733 laptop and it feels just as peppy as the high performance rig I use at work loaded with MS apps.

Re:A Blessing!

[by Anonymous Coward]

1) People may only use 20% of an application's functionality, but different people use a different 20%. So a competing application needs to implement at least 80% of the features to even get a look in.

2) "Open Office" ... "a solid interface and feature set they start turning towards making the product more stable and more efficient". Open Office is nice, and it is free, but it's not a great overall example of a wonderful application :)

Re:A Blessing!

[LWATCDR (28044)]

I still find it scary that 1ghz and 512mb is considered low end for an office PC.

Re:A Blessing!

[jlarocco (851450)]

You do realize that Opera works wonderfully on PCs with specs even lower than that, right? Guess it doesn't help you much now, but you should be kicking yourself for the past.

Based on my experience with FF2

[Chrisq (894406)]

Based on my experience with firefox 2 I would say that once you have a few plugins (cough: *adblock*) the graph will not be flat but will slowly increase. Not that this is the fault of the browser writers, but it will be many people's real world experience.

Re:Based on my experience with FF2

[pohl (872)]

Rejoice: FF3 has some garbage collection improvements [mozilla.org] that should fix many leaks caused by browser add-ons.

A trend is emerging...

[JonMartin (123209)]

We've being peppered with articles about FF3 lately. Most have been fairly light on content but the consistent high praise (and personal experience using beta2) has made it clear to me that FF3 will be very, very good. I'm actually looking forward to the official release.

Getting excited about a new version of a web browser: how 90's is that?

Re:

[BarryJacobsen (526926)]

if you're still on beta two, try beta four - it's noticably faster!

Not real world (for me)...

[alyawn (694153)]

I think a much better test would be to see a single window with 30 tabs. I don't know anyone that would have 30 windows of a browser running. All this proves to me is that FF does a better job of sharing resources across instances. Does anyone use windows rather than tabs to manage their browsing?

comes at a cost

[buddyglass (925859)]

Can't remember where I read it, but I recently read a description of how they achieved some of this efficiency. Much of it has to do with using a different memory allocator which avoids fragmentation. That's good. However, a lot of it also comes from "expiring" cached data according to some time-based policy. That's probably a good idea too, but it's not a memory savings that can be considered "for free". You're actually expunging cached data from memory, which means you may have to reload it again later, and you're spending CPU cycles to enforce that policy. It probably requires minimal CPU to do that, but if they implement it via polling it could screw up the processor's ability to sleep, which in turn jacks up battery usage on laptops. Witness the recent effort on linux to get various apps to "fix" the way they behave in order to play better on laptops. This could end up being a regression in that area.

plugins

[lseltzer (311306)]

I've been using FF3 for months and it's definitely efficient with memory, but the graph doesn't reflect my own experience with IE7 and FF2. At the moment, for instance, on my XPSP2 system with both FF2 and IE7 running, probably for weeks, FF2 is using about 509MB and IE7 about 208MB.

Perhaps some of the differences here have to do with plugins? There are still a bunch that don't work with FF3.

Re:plugins

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

IE lies. Much of its memory is hidden in system DLLs that don't show up in the Windows Task Manager. To get an accurate read on how much memory IE is using, you need to use special tools that track memory across the system.

Re:plugins

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

Those system DLLs are shared by multiple programs (at least in theory) and thus have their memory usage accounted for separate from the programs that use them. In fact, the memory counts against the operating system. Microsoft uses this fact to hide much of IE's memory in DLLs that have been installed as part of the OS.

So unless you have tools to pick apart where your OS's memory is going, you're going to get bad results for IE.

Try using something like Process Explorer [microsoft.com] instead. It will give you a much better view into what memory is being used and where.

Threading

[Thaelon (250687)]

But what about threading?

I'm tired of every browser tab and window I have open locking up so Flash can render in one of the windows.

Even IE doesn't do this!

I'm certainly impressed

[xx01dk (191137)]

So far with the beta. It may be purely subjective, but when I click the task bar icon, FF3 opens _instantly_ or near enough as I can tell. And I've been using FF2 since it's release.

I also left a couple of browser windows open all night last night and was able to navigate pretty well this morning; if I'd done that with FF2 it would have been like viewing the web over dial-up again.

I think what impressed me the most was the hassle-free install. I uninstalled FF2, thinking I was ready to start with a fresh browser, and to my complete surprise, FF3 installed with nearly the exact same settings as I had been using in FF2. With the exception of that pesky "home" button that I can't seem to get rid of (What, no right-click > delete option?) everything is exactly the same. I'm still trying to get used to the address bar that tries to predict what site you're looking for as well; I suspect that with some tweaking I'll be able to dial it in pretty well.

Cheers~

JavaScript performance

[Niten (201835)]

Reduced memory usage is great, but if you're more interested in speed you should take a look at Firefox 3b4's results on the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark, where testers commonly found that it performed twice as well as the latest Opera beta, and nearly three times as fast as Firefox 2 [mozillalinks.org].

I haven't yet heard anything definitive about Gecko's performance in FF3 with respect to FF2 or the rendering engines in other major web browsers, but from my own experience with the betas I can subjectively say "it's fast"; if I'm missing out on speed using FF3b4 instead of the latest WebKit, I can't tell the difference myself.

And Beta 4 is quite stable, to boot. Mozilla really pulled out all the stops on this one... unless you have incompatible extensions holding you back, do yourself a favor and upgrade now.

Note to submitter : memory-footprint != speed

[mxs (42717)]

The in-testing browser even trumps Opera, which has long been regarded as the fastest browser around.

And how does a smaller memory-footprint yield faster performance, EXACTLY ? The two are not necessarily related -- or even related in a way you might like. There are plenty of algorithms that sacrifice memory to become more speedy (and vice versa). The size of a memory-footprint of an application tells you exactly ... nothing ... about its speed, or its relative speed to other programs with different footprints.

Quite honestly, I don't care about memory consumption so long as it remains reasonable. My Opera-process has been running for weeks with, at times, heavy usage (dozens of open windows, some with highly dynamic pages). It's been stable and quick throughout that time, and did not grow to a size where I'd have to wonder what the hell is causing swapping.
Yes, you can crash Opera (often related to badly coded plugins), and yes, you can make it unresponsive. I found, however, that it's far easier to do that to Firefox than Opera, and that Opera has been consistently snappier. Maybe that'll change with FF3. Hopefully it will, competition in that arena is always good.

Re:Graph shape

[savala (874118)]

Out of curiosity, what's the dropoff and flatline near the end of both Firefox lines on the graph? Anyone know?

From the original blog post [pavlov.net]:

For the results below we loaded 29 different web pages through 30 windows over 11 cycles (319 total page loads), always opening a new window for each page load (closing the oldest window alive once we hit 30 windows). At the end we close all the windows but one and let the browser sit for a few minutes so see if they will reclaim memory, clear short-term caches, etc.

So that is all the memory being reclaimed upon closing all but one of the windows, and then doing nothing whatsoever.

Re:Graph shape

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

Not a very realistic test, in that case, since most people tend to recycle browser windows. Adding in proper cleanup routines when the window is closed doesn't address this. That said, it's great that Gecko is trimming some of the fat. Hopefully it will start to be a competitor to WebKit in the mobile space soon.

Re:Graph shape

[epine (68316)]

I happened to have a Fedora system, so I stuck with FF 1.5.x right up until the first day of FF 3b1. I do a lot of work in MediaWiki environments, often pounding away the whole day in FF. Somehow, I rarely manage to have less than 50 tabs open, occasionally as many as 200, in four to eight windows scattered over four desktops.

Memory usage under 1.5.x was unbelievably bad. After a week of heavy use, it would routinely plateau in the 1-1.5 GB range, at which point it would become intolerably slow and force me to restart.

I've downloaded every FF 3 beta the day of first release, and pounded on them all.

3b1 crapped out after just over 2 weeks of heavy use. 3b2 was noticeably better, but not perfect. I wasn't thrilled with 3b3. Page transitions to previously open tabs became more sluggish, back/forward browsing was slower, and they really messed up window to window tab move (didn't take the tab history along for the ride, causing me to lose some major unsaved edits while discovering this unpleasant fact, which happily is now fixed in 3b4).

3b4 has been tremendously solid over the relatively short period since its release. Virtual 540MB, resident 330MB. That's spectacularly low by the standards of previous releases for the intensity of my use. Back/forward page transitions on aged tabs remains slower than for 3b1, but not annoyingly so. Overall, it just feels solid now.

I'm having trouble comprehending that *anyone* once said Firefox had no serious memory leaks. Say what? Firefox 1.5 was the Ginny Sacramoni of web browsers. I'm happy to confirm that Firefox has successfully excised the 90-pound mole from its waddling derriere.

NoScript makes a major impact on Firefox memory

[tjwhaynes (114792)]

I'm having trouble comprehending that *anyone* once said Firefox had no serious memory leaks. Say what? Firefox 1.5 was the Ginny Sacramoni of web browsers. I'm happy to confirm that Firefox has successfully excised the 90-pound mole from its waddling derriere.

If you ran NoScript on Firefox, you probably were entirely happy with the memory usage. Much of the memory fragmentation and leaks due to circular references was caused by Javascript, either on pages loaded or other extensions running. NoScript radically reduces the amount of Javascript being executed by your browser and therefore radically reduces the amount of memory used/fragmented/leaked.

Plus of course, the performance of page loading also improves because your browser isn't trying to execute some moronic scripts designed to track your movements and display "punch the monkey" ads.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Re:Graph shape

[ozmanjusri (601766)]

They uninstalled IE?

Re:Remember when people coded for small memory use

[Nibbler999 (1101055)]

That graph is based on 30 open windows at a time, not 'basic web browsing'.

Re:Remember when people coded for small memory use

[maddskillz (207500)]

That is basic web browsing if you aren't using pop-up blocking, and going to the wrong sites

Re:

[eebra82 (907996)]

That graph is based on 30 open windows at a time, not 'basic web browsing'.

Which is exactly the point of why a memory-hogging application is bad. I don't think anyone is experiencing problems with what you call basic web browsing, but we all have moments when we suddenly end up with 10+ windows. That's when it matters the most, too.

Re:Remember when people coded for small memory use

[mi (197448)]

That graph is based on 30 open windows at a time, not 'basic web browsing'.

My (very) significant other keeps 5-10 windows open with 4-12 tabs in each... No kidding...

Here is the top(1) entry of her firefox-session (running linux-firefox-2 on FreeBSD/amd64):

84676 i 1 96 0 1078M 613M select 1 524:47 4.98% firefox-bin

My own (native) session uses 2.5 times less... In other words — "common practice" is a very loose standard :)

I think

[Chrisq (894406)]

Your terminal must be upside down.

Re:From the ars discussion...

[The MAZZTer (911996)]

Starting with you, apparently. LOWER LINES ARE BETTER. Next.

Re:

[bconway (63464)]

Which graph are you looking at? On the one linked, IE has double the memory footprint of Firefox when 30 tabs are open, and doesn't reclaim any memory when they're closed.

Re:

[TripMaster Monkey (862126)]

Can you fault the methodology employed in the tool?

Re:That's when testing with their own tool

[FrankNFurter (89904)]

How about the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark [webkit.org], produced by the WebKit developers?

The latest Firefox 3 nightly beat Safari 3.1 as well as the latest WebKit nightly on my iMac (2.0 GHz C2D, 2 GB RAM). You might want to run your own tests; you'll find that Firefox 3 is pretty damn quick.

Re:I don't care

[somersault (912633)]

I burned it to CD and it still let through water from the middle, ergo it leaks

Re:I don't care

[RealGrouchy (943109)]

Your system is overheating. I keep mine below 0 degrees celsius, and wasn't able to recreate the leaks you described.

- RG>

Re:FF won't win

[denis-The-menace (471988)]

And they are running the test in Windows? Who knows whether there's not an undocumented feature of IE which is telling it's O$ to swap *all* FF's RAM into disk? Or even freeing FF's memory? The predator always wins.

MS has done something like this in the past and got caught.
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=drdos+windows+crash&btnG=Google+Search&meta= [google.ca]

Re:Firefox memory efficient?

[argiedot (1035754)]

Actually you will be surprised to note that cows do indeed breed, and so do whales. Of course, they don't breed with apostrophes the way your words do.

Apostrophes

[Nerdposeur (910128)]

Not until cow's and whale's breed!!

Clippy: I see you're trying to use apostrophes. You seem to be confused. Did you mean:

• Proper nouns, possessive? ("Not until Cow's offspring and Whale's offspring breed!")
• Plural nouns, possessive? ("Not until cows' offspring and whales' offspring breed!")
• Plural nouns? ("Not until cows and whales breed!")