Firefox Help, Tips and Tricks

There has been a lot of talk lately about memory usage in IE7 and Firefox 2. I decided to run the numbers on my machine. No agenda hre, just which one uses more RAM in my tests.
Here is the environment:
P4 1GB RAM
Windows Vista RC2 Build 5477
IE7
Firefox 2 RC3
Both browsers homepages were set to techmeme.com so they start up in the same environment.
The machine was completely rebooted between tests and each browser was run 1 at a time not together.
I used ctrl+click to open up 50 tabs from techmeme and wesmirch
Below is a chart showing memory usage as reported by task manager at each 5 pages loaded.

	Memory Usage (K)
Pages	Firefox	IE
Start	25612	15600
5	41228	35504
10	65968	50800
15	80232	87540
20	97832	101224
25	109812	112308
30	139552	133432
35	165392	154172
40	199736	196532
45	212916	213052
50	238068	237800

Looks pretty much the same to me. Then I started to spend 2 minutes browsing between each tab. Opening a tab, moving to another one and opening it. Randomly through the list. In this test, IE memory usage soared up to 322,608K. Firefox on the other hand stayed mostly the same with only about 10K increase.
Tags: mozilla, firefox, browser, ie, memory, comparison