Today I ran out of RAM in my Windows 7 virtual machine. The dozens of tabs open in Opera and Chrome were enough to take whatever was left of the 4 GB of RAM that was allotted to it. Remembering that recent versions of Firefox had better memory management, I tried it out again.
I abandoned Firefox a few years ago. I was not only annoyed that its update process never worked, since both on my Mac and Windows the user account I use is not “administrator”, but also how those quick releases in succession broke all its plugins. Well, using it again, the updater process is still badly broken. Yet I bit the bullet and manually installed its latest version.
I was pleasantly surprised. Of course, not only its speed is comparable to Chome, but it handles memory far better than any other browser. When dealing with extreme situations, for example with gigantic amount of images (An example; warning may crash your computer if not using Firefox: XKCD Click and Drag full map), it fares far better than other browsers. Also, because it doesn’t launch each plugin in its own browser instance (what is done in Chrome, Safari and Opera), memory usage is shared amongst all plugins.
I even tried for the first time Firefox Sync to synchronize my bookmarks and tabs across machines. It worked fine, though sadly Firefox Home for iPhone was abandoned late August. Bookmark sync rekindled my interest into trying out Xmarks. I somehow kept all my bookmarks for years, and I could use that to repatriate all of them, remove sites from 10 years ago that don’t work anymore, and sort them properly.
So what are the lessons? Firefox still rocks, Chrome and Opera use way to much memory (and aggressive disk caching too), I’ll miss Firefox Home, and I need to start using Xmarks.
Published on September 25, 2012 at 21:38 EDT
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