Memory Usage - IE8 beta 1 vs Firefox vs Opera

Recently, Firefox got an update to the newest version 3.0. Before, many people were complaining about how much memory firefox uses whenever you use it. It could go up to 600MB if you used it long enough!

But now, with the release of firefox version 3, Mozilla has promised to fix over 300 memory leaks. Memory leaks occur when the browser fails to dispatch memory that it has already used, (happens especially, though not always, when you go to a lot of sites in the same tab).

These are the version numbers of the browsers we used -

• Firefox 3
• Opera 9.5
• IE8 beta 1

This is how I tested -
We went to the nba channel on youtube, and played all of the videos in the playlist "There Can Only be One" in high quality (if available). After a couple seconds after they all played, we went to Windows Task manager to see which one consumed the least amount of memory.

Here are the results -

• Firefox 3 - 53092 kb
  
• Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 - 59701 kb
• Opera 9.5 - 85832 kb

So, Firefox did the best out of the bunch, but it wasn't much better than Internet Explorer, and Opera used up the most memory, a whopping 86 megabytes Unfortunately, we did not test IE7. A graph showing the results is on the right.

-22nd Century Technology