Strange claims has been going around that new that Firefox 3 would consume less memory than Opera 9.50. From historical perspectice claim sounds interesting, since historically Opera has been much more memory efficient than Firefox.
Thus lets make a simple test, with slight unfairness into direction of Opera, since it’s my main browser and has also mail and newsfeeds as its’ burden. While Firefox is on its’ clean default state, without any kind of plugins.
Test: Lets open standard pre-existing set of webpages (open in my Opera, thus Opera has extra burden of remembering browsing histories for each page) in Firefox 3, and see how well browsers compare to each other in memory usage (according to ’top’).
So results after opening 15 web pages (in new tabs) in Firefox 3 (remember that Opera has also some additional overhead in my test).
[code]
VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
597m 204m 27m S 0.0 7.3 4:48.73 eclipse
324m 192m 22m S 0.3 6.9 0:46.03 firefox
212m 136m 18m S 0.3 4.9 24:50.95 opera
[/code]
And test is done. Now lets’ see who is the winner and who must go into shade in shame. Real bloatware here is seemingly Eclipse, which is sadly true. Eclipse has nothing to do with browsers, but for fanciness I like to point out how fat it is.
And regarding actual subjects, the browsers: Resident Size
[code]
Opera 9.50: 136m
Firefox 3: 192m
[/code]
which means that Opera is consuming 56MB less memory, while doing much more.
Conclusion: Firefox 3 is bloatware compare to Opera.