Internet Explorer 8: Over 2x "Fatter" than Firefox
Found on exo.blog on Monday, 01 September 2008
IE 8 consumed just under 380MB of memory during a 10-site, multi-tab browsing scenario of popular general media, technical media and humor-related Web destinations.
By contrast, IE 7 consumed just under 250MB rendering this same workload, while Firefox 3.01 put both IE versions to shame by completing the same browsing scenario in just 159MB of RAM.
No matter how you slice the data, IE 8 represents a massive expansion of the baseline runtime requirements for Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser.
Perhaps I just don't understand it, but I wonder where the small and efficient applications have gone. I guess since hardware resources got cheap, programming did too. This just a neverending circle. IE8 just points it out again; but Firefox isn't cheap on resources either for what it's doing.