So I'm reading the news today and I see prominently displayed on a few websites that Chrome is gaining market share. Now personally I'm a Firefox guy but I can't say that I'm in any way dismayed to see IE losing ground. As I read the article I scrolled down to find the user comments. Most of them were people bashing IE and touting the supposed glory that is Chrome. One in particular caught my attention as some idgit said "Firefox is a memory hog, Chrome is the memory king!" I don't know why, maybe I'm just bored, but I decided I would test that little theory on a few websites.
I downloaded and installed the latest Chrome and pitted it against IE 9 and my Firefox (12.0a1 Nightly Update Channel 1-4-12). Some might say it's unfair that I'm pitting a NIGHTLY build against so called stable releases but this is the version of Firefox that I run so I wanted the results to be relevant to me.
I tested 7 websites that I view on nearly a daily basis in succession and looked at the memory usage of each browser as I did so. I also made note of the number of processes each browser used for each site. I won't bore you with the individual memory usage of each site but what I found is rather interesting.
On Average:
Chrome - 151.9MB spread over 3.28 processes
IE - 52.3MB spread over 2 processes
Firefox - 107.1MB spread over 1 process
To my dismay I found that on average Firefox uses 204% of the memory that IE does, however, Chrome used 290%!!!
So what does this mean to me? A few things really:
1. Chrome never has in the past, and still has not given me any reason to use it. It is not noticeably faster for any of MY usage, and it uses significantly more memory.
2. Internet Explorer 9 might actually have something on Firefox these days, perhaps I'll try using it for a while.
3. This little test has confirmed what I already knew, and that is that 99.99999% of what people say on the internet is completely un-founded, un-tested, B.S. that is based strictly on personal biases with NO actual testing involved. From the mouth of an obvious Chrome fanatic, "Chrome is the memory king." If by king he means fat, bloated, and truly useless in a modern civilization he might be on to something. Granted I know that 7 webpages is far from a definitive test, but they are the 7 most common sites that I visit, so that tells ME what I need to know. I'm gonna give IE another shot but ultimately I see myself sticking with Firefox because it has the interface I am most comfortable. My computers do not suffer from a lack of speed or memory, so a few micro-seconds here and there waiting for a web page to load really is not all that big a deal.
What does this mean to you? Likely nothing. If you take anything away from it, take this, don't believe what anybody says until you do your own test. And one last thing, if you insist on jumping on the "it's new therefore it MUST be better" bandwagon, please refrain from posting B.S. unless you have some real data to back it up. Please, use whatever browser you feel most comfortable with and be happy with it. Test the waters every now and then to see if anything looks better to you, but don't abandon an old favorite just because "some guy" says it's better without really testing it for yourself.
I downloaded and installed the latest Chrome and pitted it against IE 9 and my Firefox (12.0a1 Nightly Update Channel 1-4-12). Some might say it's unfair that I'm pitting a NIGHTLY build against so called stable releases but this is the version of Firefox that I run so I wanted the results to be relevant to me.
I tested 7 websites that I view on nearly a daily basis in succession and looked at the memory usage of each browser as I did so. I also made note of the number of processes each browser used for each site. I won't bore you with the individual memory usage of each site but what I found is rather interesting.
On Average:
Chrome - 151.9MB spread over 3.28 processes
IE - 52.3MB spread over 2 processes
Firefox - 107.1MB spread over 1 process
To my dismay I found that on average Firefox uses 204% of the memory that IE does, however, Chrome used 290%!!!
So what does this mean to me? A few things really:
1. Chrome never has in the past, and still has not given me any reason to use it. It is not noticeably faster for any of MY usage, and it uses significantly more memory.
2. Internet Explorer 9 might actually have something on Firefox these days, perhaps I'll try using it for a while.
3. This little test has confirmed what I already knew, and that is that 99.99999% of what people say on the internet is completely un-founded, un-tested, B.S. that is based strictly on personal biases with NO actual testing involved. From the mouth of an obvious Chrome fanatic, "Chrome is the memory king." If by king he means fat, bloated, and truly useless in a modern civilization he might be on to something. Granted I know that 7 webpages is far from a definitive test, but they are the 7 most common sites that I visit, so that tells ME what I need to know. I'm gonna give IE another shot but ultimately I see myself sticking with Firefox because it has the interface I am most comfortable. My computers do not suffer from a lack of speed or memory, so a few micro-seconds here and there waiting for a web page to load really is not all that big a deal.
What does this mean to you? Likely nothing. If you take anything away from it, take this, don't believe what anybody says until you do your own test. And one last thing, if you insist on jumping on the "it's new therefore it MUST be better" bandwagon, please refrain from posting B.S. unless you have some real data to back it up. Please, use whatever browser you feel most comfortable with and be happy with it. Test the waters every now and then to see if anything looks better to you, but don't abandon an old favorite just because "some guy" says it's better without really testing it for yourself.
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