Isn’t Firefox supposed to be the more efficient browser?
I’m looking at my Task Manager right now, with Firefox and IE8 open (same website, one tab each.) Firefox is using 124k of memory, while IE is using 26k.
That is contrary to what I’ve been led to believe about Firefox being *less *resource intensive. I’d be curious to see other people’s similar experiences.
I’m on a Windows 7 PC, with FF 3.5.5. Both have Google toolbar added on. FF also has Adblock Plus.
One window with one tab is not the best indicator of browser memory usage. A test like this test here would be a better indicator of browser memory usage. Note that Firefox has the lowest memory usage after 3 hours of normal web browsing.
IE also cheats, as it is essentially built into the operating system, and can offset its memory usage on other processes.
Also, have you checked the VM size? A lot of times the regular RAM size is misleading.
Finally, Firefox is nowhere near as lean as it used to be. It has developed a lot of memory fragmentation, which means it can’t release memory as well. Having a bunch of tabs will use up the appropriate amount of memory, but closing them will not decrease it. One needs to “reboot” Firefox as often as older versions of Windows.