Firefox 3 Memory Efficiency

Published on June 25, 2008 By kryo In Personal Computing

More Firefox news today! Some of you may be aware of Firefox's notorious record for memory usage in older versions--slowly growing throughout the day to the point that few dark corners of your RAM were free from its grasping tendrils. Happily, it looks like those days are now over.

Programmer Sam Allen of Dot Net Perls has released the results of some real-world usage testing of Firefox 3 and other current and upcoming browsers, and Firefox users will find the results quite pleasing: FF3 appears to be far better at using less, and cleaning up no-longer-needed memory than previous versions (usage remained low and fairly steady throughout the testing session).

Better, it now seems to use overall less than IE8, Opera 9.5, and Safari for Windows, if Sam's usage was consistent between browsers (I'd place less stock in these conclusions, in any case).

I'm a heavy Firefox user myself--my forum rounds typically see hundreds of tabs coming and going throughout a day-long session, so this is great news to me. Even more, it makes Firefox an even better option for low-end machines where memory is at a premium. Just one more reason to switch, if you haven't already.

This concludes this week's Firefox evangelism post

Comments (Page 1)

Mistralok1

on Jun 25, 2008

Preach on, brother. I upgraded when it was released, and am pleased as punch. One question though; How do I get rid of that drop-down from the address bar? I can't find any option for disabling it, or even clearing it out.

kryo

on Jun 25, 2008

Try this.

UEF Soldier

on Jun 25, 2008

firefox, but I haven't really noticed the memory thing on my gaming rig. With 8gigs, I'd be glad if it used more, cuz then it wouldn't be a waste of a couple gigs.

But I have noticed FireFox 3 using less ram on my 4gig lappy, and agree it would be a god send for lower end pcs. FireFox for the win!

Gambler

on Jun 25, 2008

Install Firefox 2 and 3 on a thumb drive via http://portableapps.com/. Launch them one at a time, and look at the memory usage.

Neilo

on Jun 25, 2008

If only the whole world used FF, we would all live in a better place. I didn't think it possible for there to be a better browser than FF2...guess i was wrong.

The drop in memory use was quite an amount really. They really did their homework on this one.....

sirphoenix

on Jun 25, 2008

great! that's what I was hoping for the most.

after 10-12 hours of work my firefox sometimes would stack up to 1GB and more slowing it down so much I have to restart it 3-4 times a day.

now the bad thing is I still have to use firefox 2 for development because it will be the dominant fox for many more month.

I'll probably have to wait until they decide to stop releasing updates and security fixes for f2...

until then it's quadruple browser time

Gambler

on Jun 25, 2008

The drop in memory use

For GalCiv2.com on my computer, the memory use goes like 45,180Kb in Firefox 2 vs 54,140Kb in Firefox 3. That is for portable installations, which have no add-ons.

kryo

on Jun 25, 2008

For GalCiv2.com in my computer, the memory use goes like 45,180Kb in Firefox 2 vs 54,140Kb in Firefox 3. That is for portable installations, which have no add-ons.

Try browsing with multiple tabs and you'll likely see the improvement.

Gambler

on Jun 25, 2008

Okay, I opened galciv2.com, gmail.com (and signed in), digg.com, bbc.co.uk and portableapps.com.

Firefox 3: 85,749
Firefox 2: 74,312
Firebird 0.7: 49,448

Phazon88

on Jun 25, 2008

Firefox 3 is teh win!

kryo

on Jun 26, 2008

Okay, I opened galciv2.com, gmail.com (and signed in), digg.com, bbc.co.uk and portableapps.com.Firefox 3: 85,749Firefox 2: 74,312Firebird 0.7: 49,448

Five isn't what I'd call "multiple"

When I'm doing my rounds, I typically have about 40-60 tabs open at once. It starts to add up then, and with FF1/FF2, the memory tends to not be released entirely when those tabs are closed and another round gets opened. Repeat, and it adds up fast.

Paging through links in each tab is also a factor, as FF keeps the prior pages in memory for fast back navigation as well.

Gambler

on Jun 27, 2008

Hm... Running it on my laptop now without portable apps stuff. I guess they did improve memory management. At some point it was something like 33meg, which is smaller than after startup. Weird.

OctopusRex

on Jun 27, 2008

40-60 tabs? Wow, that's a lot, that's got to be pretty uncommon right? Don't most people just, like, close them when they're done?

Anyway, I don't really get the FF3 fanboyism. Was using FF2 before, but now I'm trying out Opera 9.5 at the moment and it's really nice (though I have ff3 installed too). I know the FF addons are a big part of the pull, but I just can't be arsed to go looking for them, I have very simple browsing needs and Opera seems to cater for them just fine in the default package without needing to go searching, downloading, trying and updating addons.

Gambler

on Jun 27, 2008

40-60 tabs? Wow, that's a lot, that's got to be pretty uncommon right?

It is a weird way to use tabs, primarily because there is no good way to navigate that many. Even TabMixPlus (which is not yet ported to FF3). That's not to say memory management can be ignored.

I wish FF3 improved startup time too, because is quite noticeable on Windows and really, really long on FreeBSD/xfce. It's one thing when you surf, it's another thing when you just want to open some javadoc from an IDE.

Anyway, I don't really get the FF3 fanboyism.

Me neither, and that's coming from someone still using FF as a primary browser since Firebird times.

kryo

on Jun 27, 2008

It is a weird way to use tabs, primarily because there is no good way to navigate that many.

Eh, not really. It's basically just from opening an entire page worth of threads from the recent posts lists at once, then going through each thread and closing them as I go.

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