Which browser (only considering, Firefox and Chrome) manages memory efficiently?

Read on to find out what I discovered.

From the initial use of Firefox 3.1 beta, I did not experience the performance enhancements as affirmed by some of the fellow users. So I decided to checkout the memory usage of Firefox 3.1b1 against Chrome 0.3.154.3.

The tests were pretty basic and simple. I opened six different tabs in both browsers and saw the initial memory usage. As you can see from the screen shot, Firefox(93,960K) consumes slightly more memory, though not much, 5% more than Chrome(89,557K). This is negligible, considering Firefox is a memory hog.

Therefore, I continued to use both browsers and obeserve its memory management over a period of time. Continuing my test, I tested Firefox for thirty minutes by clicking various links in different tabs and then in Chrome (the clicks were not exactly same for both the browsers, but it was fair enough).

After thirty minutes of browsing, I was surprised by the results (below screen shot).

Chrome is using 128,521K and Firefox is using 106,660K. Chrome’s memory usage has increased almost 40%  and Firefox memory usage has increased by 14%. For me, the difference was certainly large, but I decided to go on testing for some more time. But I did not see much of difference in the memory useage, Firefox using 103,848K and Chrome using 125,380K.

Now I decided to test the browsers by closing and opening new tabs. Guess what? Firefox is using 95,900K and Chrome is using 104,346K. Firefox is still using lesser memory, which I thought was good.

To be very frank, I was expecting Chrome to be the winner in these tests, as Google claimed Chrome was designed with improved memory management.  From my tests, it is evident Firefox is using lesser memory than Chrome for browsing.

But I was not completely satisfied with the tests as it was not conclusive. So, I closed all the tabs in Firefox and Chrome, except for one tab (emty tab for Firefox, memory tab for Chrome).

I saw the results and said to myself, “Google is in the right direction by using seperate process for tabs”. Hope, Firefox picks up on it — for one empty tab, Firefox used 98M whereas Chrome used 32M.