I normally use FireFox as my main web browser for all my machines since I like all the features and available plugins, however, it does take quite a while to initially start up. Maybe it’s because I have a good number of plugins initializing or something, who knows. In any case, I decided that I should probably examine the other available web browsers for use with my Dell Mini 9. Chrome is a browser recently released by Google, and currently has a small percentage of the market. Then there’s Internet Explorer (IE) which is provided by Microsoft and has been updated several times to compete with FireFox. Finally there’s Safari by Apple which I’m excluding from this evaluation because I just don’t like it!
What’s nice about Chrome is the ability to hide the toolbars and such at the top of the screen to free up more viewable space for the actual web pages. Firefox doesn’t seem to do a good of a job hiding such toolbars as Chrome and IE. If you look at the memory usage for these three web browsers, here’s what I found after conducting an informal test:
So it seems that FireFox uses the least amount of memory as you begin to use more tabs in your browser. In fact, Chrome actually creates a entirely new process for each tab (if you look at Task Manager, you’ll see several chrome.exe entries). I also have to point out that with FireFox I am loading a handful of plugins that may be taking up some of that memory. Again, this was a very informal test so your mileage may vary (I did these tests on my Vista Desktop PC).
From all this, I think I’ll continue to stick with FireFox and use that as my browser for the Mini 9.
Posted by zunetips 