Firefox vs. IE Options

[Spectatrix]

All of us are Firefox users! Except for Dogmeat. Because he's an IE LOSER!

[impala454]

It's well-known that Firefox has a bigger memory footprint than a single window of IE.  However, Firefox's memory usage barely increases when adding tabs, whereas IE spawns multiple processes for multiple windows.  In short, if you have a lot of windows/tabs open, Firefox is generally better.

it doesn't have anything to do with one being "better". Tabs will always use less memory because there's less overhead creating windows. here's a quick test I did, take what you will from it.





they use almost exactly the same memory when in separate windows. it makes perfect sense too because the vast majority of data is the page itself, not the browser. The size of the html & graphics for cnn.com are the same no matter what browser you use. And the whole giant savings by doing tabs is 13 MB of pagefile (and my pagefile is 1GB). I don't have IE7 beta on this machine to test its tabs, but I'm sure it'd be pretty close as well.

If you open Internet Explorer by launching the executable it will create a new process for each window.

If you create a new Internet Explorer window by going to "File" ---> "New" ---> "Window" then it does not start a new process for each window.

Go ahead and argue some more though, because it's fun watching.

there used to be a setting so you could make all new windows open in a separate process. I'd prefer it this way but I don't see the setting in there anymore.