Round 9: Speed

Draw, they’re both sufficiently fast for me. Oh, you think that that isn’t scientific?   Fine, be like that. Flame me if you want. Complain in a forum (just make sure to link to the article, we like free press). This isn’t video encoding or finite element analysis folks, if your browser feels slow there is something else wrong.

The Firefox beta does claim to have better forward/backward performance. It is snappy. IE7?  Seems just about the same, as long as the page you are cycling to is still in memory.


Round 10: Memory Usage

I am not going to try to do anything too scientific with the memory footprint numbers; they just are not repeatable enough for me to trust that the test is fair to each browser. The above example does give you a feel though. May almighty plastic help you if you have less than 512 megs or 1 gig of RAM these days.

Remember when 60 megabytes of RAM was a considerable amount of memory? Neither do I, nor does it seem the IE7 team does. With three tabs open (BentUser, The Acid Test, and Ars Technica) IE7 was consuming a healthy 68 megs of RAM. Firefox beat up on poor little IE7 in this test, consuming only 49 megs. I wouldn’t put too much stock in this difference; it will depend on what you’re doing, your system, phases of the moon and maybe your miticlorian count. At any rate both numbers are pretty high; seems efficiency is a thing of the past in the software world.


Round 11: Stability

Honestly, I’ve been playing with both of these betas for a good amount of time and haven’t seen a crash. They are beta products, so you might suspect some issues, but honestly both code-bases are well established and neither is making dramatic changes. I’d have been pretty surprised to see any problems. While it isn’t too bright to install beta software if you need it for business (particularly web apps within IE), casual browsing at home with either should be fine.