According to Mozilla, Firefox is the best memory performance browser, for its multi-process architecture. Up until now, the tests in 2012 and 2014 looked very good for Mozilla, particularly when compared to the memory usage noticed on Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer on the Windows OS. The key here is the multi-process architecture, which keeps the browser aside from the content processes in Firefox.
Mozilla tested their browser again and loaded 30 web pages on their tabs, waiting 10 seconds between the loads and checked the memory usage. The results have shown that Firefox is particularly efficient when it comes to memory. This applies to Windows and Linux, where the result is relevant.
The more content processes are added, the more memory Firefox uses, naturally, but the difference between its performance on 2 and 8 content processes is not as big as Mozilla assumed in 2016. On Windows 10, with 8 content processes active, the memory performance increased from 587 to 905 MB. On Linux, the increase was only 125 MB under the same circumstances.
On Mac devices, the difference is not that big. Firefox, tested on 2, then 4 content processes running, showed less memory usage than Chrome, but we’re talking about a difference of only 150 Mb. On 8 active content processes, the browser used more memory than Chrome. And since we’re at it, Chrome used 1478 MB on Linux, 1365 MB on Mac and 1382 MB on Windows.
Mozilla plans to go to 4 content processes in the future. This will determine Firefox to use less memory than Chrome on all the operating systems, and we know this for sure on Windows and Linux. What we need to know is that Google Chrome uses 1 content process per each tab, it is their default setting. All in all, it seems that Firefox remains the most memory friendly browser in 2017!
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