But in the case were the tests complete ? It talked about speed, CPU, and read access time. But nothing about memory consumption. I jumped on the gun, took a look at my dozen tabs opened on Firefox and opened them as well under Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) and Chrome.
As you can see, Firefox momory consumption is bundled inside a single process while IE8 and Chrome creates several processes with different memory consumption.
But after summing all results, I was astonished to see that Internet Explorer 8 is the best browser concerning memory consumption. The fancy Excel graphic below perfectly illustrate that fact.
There is no doubt that IE 8 requires less memory than Chrome or Firefox.
For the sake of fairness, here are the types of websites I used for the test. All of them are common sites I use on a day-to-day basis:
- iGoogle
- Two bugtrackers: Mantis and Jira
- Two tabs concerned games on Kongregate.com
- A PHPMyAdmin and a MediaWiki pages
- A page on my online game (MMOG): Star Wars Combine
- A web page from the MySQL site, one from an online banking, one from a newspaper with forums, and that blog on sixrevisions.com