If you’re supporting aging systems – especially ones you want to squeeze a few more months or years out of – you might want to look at ways users can conserve memory.
Look no further than the Web browser most of them are using.
An independent researcher did just that recently and came up with some surprising info that could help.
.Net developer Sam Allen recently posted the results of his testing on his Web site. Writes Allen: Web browser performance is an often talked-about and flaunted thing, but many claims are not really backed up by solid evidence.
I wrote software that collected millions of data points over 14 hours of actual browsing time.
Using an application he designed for the investigation – Memory Watcher – Allen found that Firefox 3.0 browser uses memory much more efficiently than its rivals Internet Explorer (IE), Flock, Opera and Safari.
Allen ran each browser between 2.69 hours and 2.91 hours. Although he didn’t claim to have visited the exact same pages with each — he believes that the trend lines drawn by Memory Watcher were
Firefox 3.0 was the clear winner, not only because it used the least amount of memory of any of the tested browsers, but its memory use didn’t noticeably grow over time.
The poorest marks went to Apple’s Safari 3.1 for Windows.
Browsers memory leaks are described as an increase in memory use the longer an application is used. In some cases, memory load becomes big enough to degrade the overall performance of some computers.
One of the much-touted features of the Firefox 3.0 was its reduced memory footprint.
If you haven’t already, you can download firefox for free! Try it out yourself and see why it’s the best browser on the planet.