Comment Re:And still... (Score 1) 511
When comparing ten tabs the article states. "The big surprise here is Opera's and Chrome's poor showing in the multi-tab tests. Overall, Firefox delivers the best memory usage results. It comes in first place for the five- and ten-tab usage tests, but fourth in the single-tab metric."
Probably due to Chrome's multi-process architecture. Each tab runs in a completely separate process, and other applets (Flash, Java, etc) are segregated into their own individual processes as well, and they're all controlled by one master process that doesn't actually handle any of the rendering. Overall, it creates a faster and significantly more stable operating environment, because one individual process can't bog down (or completely crash) the entire program. Because of this system, each tab requires its own memory space as well as a lot of redundant code running in every process. Firefox has more bloat in the main process, but doesn't need redundancies when running multiple tabs. Therefore, Firefox uses less memory with a high number of tabs and Chrome uses less with a low number. Mozilla has been trudging along towards bringing multi-process architecture to Firefox as well, though, so that "advantage" (in quotes because memory usage isn't all that important as unused RAM is wasted RAM) may "soon" (in quotes because they've been talking about this for years and I have yet to hear about a whole lot of progress) go away.