Scobleizer - Latest Comments in The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

Karnautrahl — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 05:34:39 -0000

Try it with Vista on 4gb of ram.

At the moment I'm looking at IE7 in taskmanager. The figure is 975,420K. That's a Gb folks.

I have a total of 5 tabs open. None of them are web 2.0 stuff particularly. Just forums oh and stumbleupon.

I'll try firefox later on, though I recall it being about 200mb.

Any cure?

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

From IND — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 03:18:11 -0000

I am now using Fire Fox and it is good and has good options too.

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

Turanga Leela — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 21:50:02 -0000

Not sure about IE7 but IE6 seems to suck far more memory than the 'Fox on what I thought would be an IE-friendly site (live.com) I blogged to this effect (http://turangal.blogspot.com/) and took the liberty to link with your blog. After I did so, I realised IE will suck a lot less when one cuts of what they call "binary behaviours" (most people use these for transparency [DXTrans:alpha] the 'Fox supports this natively through Opacity). Is your experience any better if you disable CraptiveX's and Binary Behaviours?

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

Raymond — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 19:33:33 -0000

I have used IE7 and FF2 in Vista. FF2 consume more memory than IE7 (may be because of plug in). However, FF2 is faster than IE7 and has more features than IE7 after the plug in. At first I consider how much memory they use. I don't care about this anymore when the one which consume more memory actually work faster. Even they are pretty much the same sometimes FF2 still has more features that I cannot find in IE7.

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

Steven Adams — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 09:19:06 -0000

We have all been fooled again by Redmond. IE 7s memory usage is by far greater than that of FireFoxs. I know what your thinking you check out both the program names under taskmanager and firefox is showing to be using more memory right... Well thats where we have been fooled IE 7 mask some of its memory usage under svhost.exe. Firefox doesn't pay attention to the commit charge and load them both see what happens... Load Firefox first IE 7 doesn't clear the memory in svhost.exe on exit.

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

costas — Wed, 16 May 2007 17:34:26 -0000

Everyone should try Opera IMHO.
I think it is even better than firefox when dealing with dozens of tabs! Responsive instantly! Firefox is good as well, but i usually end up overloading it with plugins to do my job.
IE drains all my system's resources and i cannot open a window after some hours.even when i close many tabs, ie still holds 150MB+

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

Nobuddy — Fri, 04 May 2007 03:15:46 -0000

I am getting sick of IE7. My browser closes for no apparent reason. I am not the only person having this problem either. I have switched to FF 1.5. I haven't downloaded FF 2 because I heard many plugins do not work properly. IE 7 has gone in a new direction than previous versions. It may look the same, but they have drastically changed the way it works, which means new bugs as well. Unfortunately, MS has a bad habit of releasing software before it is ready. In response to question above, the reason why FF has such a small market share is because it doesn't ship with Windows, not because there is anything wrong with it. Most people don't even know how to download a different browser.

I agree that IE and FF are not concerned with memory consumption. In short, they should be. Before IE's tabbed environment I opened up several windows (with alt-tab, I really didn't have a problem with this). I didn't use up half as much memory as I do now. Why does a tabbed environment on IE7 make it run so much worst than IE6. The solution of "just add more memory" just sucks. Why should I upgrade (or buy a new computer in some cases) just to be able to do what I did last year? My computer shouldn't slow down just because I have 7 or 8 webpages open. What's the problem? I'm sick of companies releasing code as quickly as possible and leaving it to hardware upgrades to make it usable. It's like a car manufacturer blaming gasoline for not giving it better mileage. BUILD A BETTER ENGINE!!!

By the way moron (aka DJB), partial source in IE doesn't give exact HTML either.

For people who want to turn this into an MS versus open-source debate, do it elsewhere please. I work

in computers. I love MS because it's easy and it makes me money. I love Linux because it's open and it makes me money. ;)

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

David — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 16:35:33 -0000

FF 1.5 is SO much faster then FF 2 and IE, so personally I stick with it on my computer.

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

willpower102q — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 20:24:41 -0000

On my toshiba m200 tablet w/ vista keeping memory usage down is a must.

A> Ie7 used an average of 50-70 mb's ram with under 10 tabs open. Firefox would use over 100 mb's ram with the same amount of windows open, and if they were left open for several hours (which is ALWAYS the case) then the memory would climb to 200-300 mb. Closing all but a few tabs would no cause firefox to release the memory, only periodically restarting the program could start at 100 again.

B> So i switched to ie7, but when 10 tabs are open, scrolling is horrifically slow, especially on long pages. Ie7 can't seem to be able to handle more than 10 tabs without slowing to a crawl.

Conclusion> buy more ram. Memory usage on firefox sucks, but the speed blows away ie7.

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

avirup dasgupta — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 04:04:36 -0000

I have found that upgrading to IE7 was a mistake I made this year.

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

bane — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 03:50:56 -0000

Yeah I found that FireFox 2 is way faassterr than IE7. The fire in FireFox rages furiously!

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

Fazal — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 14:10:47 -0000

Good test, helpful to chose right browser, but i like and often use Ff.

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

webgirl — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 10:21:58 -0000

The whole comment above from "DJb" has got to be the stupidest thing I've read in a long time. Thanks for the laugh, moron!

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

DJb — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 09:31:42 -0000

A lot of dumb asses here that shouldn't even attempt to test. Yes, IE7 is must different on vista than XP. The guy that claims to be a web developer and hates IE. lol, makes me laugh. Ok, here's one thing that sucks about FF. If you highlight an area on a webpage and say view specific source, it doesn't give you the exact source, it reorders it. Ex: it will move parameters around, add quotes, etc. How is this helpful? it's retarded! As a "real" web dev., I want the "real" source! Hahaha.. catch the jab there? at the wannabe web dev's that work on their buddies site and hate one browser or the other cause they don't know $hit. No real web dev. hates any browser. They all have their good and bad points. Just code and shut up. I'm anti MS, but you have to hand it to them. They don't make a browser for 6 years. Release one and it's just as good as the competition. And FF only managed to get a max of 10% of the market at best in that time. Pretty sad. MS basically let them. IE is integrated with the OS, FF is not. It's hard to compare the 2.

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

kmiuc — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 04:11:46 -0000

Cool Developer says:
"All in all, Microsoft has reitrated the fact that they ship old wine in new bottles. So it would be insane on the part of users to expect something new from Microsoft."

This is not correct. Have you looked at Vista, IE7, Office 12? They have tons of new code in it. Also, Software devlopement does not mean that you release a new OS, or a tool and you write it from scratch. Only insane people will do that. There are tons of things new from MSFT. Look at Xbox 360, Zune (coming up), Windows Live. You cannot make a cmpany this big by selling repetitive and bad software.

IE7 release never claimed that MSFT has written the browser from scratch. Yes, IE7 came a bit late in the game but I believe realising mistake and learning from it is a much bigger thing. There are tons of improvement done in IE7. This is not only limited to tabbed browsing, phishing filter and RSS feed. There is a lot of improvement in printing, choosing multiple search provider and a cool new look. Not to forget number of bug fixes, tons of improvement in javascript engine and all. And pretty of smaller stuff like 'Delteing the entire cache in one go', 'Having a X in the tab', 'Hiding the menu bar', a better favorite organizer, capability to Import/Export fav/settings in a better way, Quick tabs. All this has involved lot of effort.

I have been using IE6 throughout my life and I simply loved IE7. If a page displays a second late here and there I really don't care. Plus, I open 5-6 tabs at the most. I have a laptop at home which is having XP Home and 256 MB RAM and I am pretty happy with IE7.

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

Cool Developer — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 17:15:53 -0000

I have been using FF since a long time and then I checked out IE7 due to fr8 amount of hype that it had created.

I am sorry to say that I was utterly dissapointed by IE7. It has greater tendency to crash as compared to FF 2. Memory consumption of IE7 is much higher than FF. I usually open around 25 tabs at a time and IE7 becomes sluggish in this case as compared to FF. On top of that, it cannot open many sites properly such as gmail etc.

Now Microsoft has admittedd this fact and have provided a tool "User Agent String Utility" for people through which they can use IE6 engine to open a site in IE7.

Apart from this, I was amazed that there was no "Check Updates" link in IE7. You have to use Windows Update for it. They should have provided this link in the Help section of IE7 itself. Moreover, they have not given much tweaking tools to the users. The settings are almost same as IE6 and the new features such as Tabbed Browsing should have options to personalise.

All in all, Microsoft has reitrated the fact that they ship old wine in new bottles. So it would be insane on the part of users to expect something new from Microsoft.

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

Sjoerd Verweij — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 14:36:36 -0000

Try

Start -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Internet Explorer (no add-ons)

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

Cyvros — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 00:24:29 -0000

I'm not using FF 2.0 (I'm using 3.0a, Minefield, so the memory situation is slightly improved when compared to 2.0), but I find that FF tends to be faster than IE7 (although, granted, I'm still using RC1 - do I even apply to this situation anymore?). But IE7 stalls. A lot. It also freezes. A lot. Could just be my system, but it just dies. A lot.

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

Daijinryuu — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 16:27:34 -0000

both are still memory hogs...i would use konqueror or galieon, but neither have flash support as far as i know!!

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

Brook — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 10:56:24 -0000

I am sorry people, What the hell are you all on. If you want a browser that uses very little RAM try Mosaic. I think I still have a copy on one of my old Windows 3.1 machines if anybody wants a copy.

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

Brent Castle — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 09:28:46 -0000

@Dillon , Mossman

Re: typing a name in the address bar and getting a relevant result (bill gates microsoft profile or george clooney's imdb page)

This is the result of the "I'm feeling lucky" option of google's search.

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

newmw — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 07:58:23 -0000

I just recently switched to Firefox, simply because I want apps on my computer that I can build up myself. I still find IE7 pressuring me to use new functions, I don't need all those "user-friendly" boogiewoogie! I only want the things I use. So the extensions in FF are still the best option for me.
Apps nowadays get packed with stuff I don't want (think mobile phone with so many functions you hardly use).

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

anon — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 02:48:24 -0000

Firefox 2 is hands down a better browser than IE 7. I don't even know why Microsoft still makes IE - I want it off my computer.

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

Bess — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 02:21:01 -0000

Sorry guys. Memory leaks we refer to is about the Javascript Object. Javascript and DOM are part of AJAX.

Watch this video to understand and how to detect memory leaks. It also shows you the tool you can accurately measure the private memory, not virtual memory. The site use a AJAX tab that is commonly used in web 2.0 on the test.
http://www.barelyfitz.com/s...

Douglas Crockford http://www.crockford.com/ja...
explains IE's own memory manager get confused and IE DOM is not managed by JScript.

Microsoft has documented the memory leak issues in many places including http://support.microsoft.co.... It mentions "This memory leak occurs because DOM objects are non-JScript objects". And it states "This memory leak will end when the browser opens a new Web page or when the browser window is closed."

Who do I trust more? I trust Douglas Crockford's expertise and his extensive knowledge in browser. As long as IE is staying with their DOM strategy, web 2.0 developers will have to spend more time debugging IE7 and write more codes to handle memory leaks.

Firefox and Opera's DOM strategy is on right track.

Now which headache is bigger? Hacking IE CSS on IE6 OR debugging memory leaks on IE7

Jeopardy question - music please...

CSS is usually handle by designer or interface engineer. Usually it is a one-person job. It is visual hack.

Almost all of the web 2.0 developers must handle AJAX. It is going to add burdens to the entire developer team. It is not visual fix. You have to use tool to audit the memory leaks. It is more time consuming to handle the memory leaks.

This bring up another issue. What you are experiencing on the memory overload on multiple tabs is something that IE has to work on. It seems like IE architectural strategy that IE team inherited is stepping on their own toe.

Re: The great Firefox 2 vs. IE 7 memory test

Geoff — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 00:34:57 -0000

what i'm seeing is the IE7 hangs just as much as IE6. Just ridiculous. And my flash player isn't working with a beep. In other words, it's not working at all.