Checking how much RAM popular Web browsers use

[Redaktion]

Chrome, Cốc Cốc, Edge, Firefox, Maxthon, Opera, Opera Air, Opera GX, Sleipnir, Whale, Yandex: Which one of these Windows Web browsers is a memory hog? This little article is designed to help those of us stuck with low-RAM systems pick the best browser.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Checking-how-much-RAM-popular-Web-browsers-use.975889.0.html

[Purple nugget]

yandex browser is a product of terrorist russia. use it at your own risk

[Li]

I was hoping you could at least include, like, 20 most popular web pages - open at the same time - and measure both memory and average CPU usage. Then check the same after a few minutes - leaving them open. Who uses just one tab?

In both CPU and memory after some time, Edge should have a strong, pun intended, edge, when putting cards to sleep - esp. when manually set to 30 s.

[Worgarthe]

Some browser choices are odd because how really popular are Opera Air or Maxthon? Why not include Brave which is inarguably quite popular? But still, I appreciate the work and the testing, nice article overall.

[Varta]

Vivaldi would be at the top, it's the original Opera which Google apparently bought and ruined. The original Opera creators brought it back to how it was from day one under the name Vivaldi

[A]

There is more to ram than just the consumption it shows up in task manager. Things can for example take up ram to reserve it or shared resource. Then there is gpu memory as well.

[A]

Vivaldi would be at the top, it's the original Opera which Google apparently bought and ruined. The original Opera creators brought it back to how it was from day one under the name Vivaldi

Opera was bought by a chinese company, not google...

[indy]

Showing RAM usage like this tells us little about how the browser reserves or manages RAM.  Of far more importance is garbage collection, memory holes (and fixes to patch them,) and overall support.  No modern browser is RAM constrained for 99.999% of tasks given to it.

[Sergey]

Hey, Li - uhm, if you have enough RAM to open 20 tabs at a time, I don't think you should care much about your browser's efficiency, ha-ha. However, with 32-bit Windows systems that only have 2 GB of RAM as well as 64-bit Windows systems that have 4 GB of RAM, you're looking at 4 tabs max. Otherwise some of the RAM's contents will go to the swap file making things painfully slow.

Worgarthe, Varta: Now that I think about it, you're both right. I should have tested Brave and Vivaldi, and Arc, too, I guess. That being said, Vivaldi doesn't have support for certain streaming media codecs that I need so this is why I don't take it seriously.

A, indy: I know however I did my best to subject the browsers to the same conditions. I think it's a fair enough comparison overall even if it isn't pefectly scientific or 'in-depth'.

Thanks,
Sergey

[Varta]

Vivaldi would be at the top, it's the original Opera which Google apparently bought and ruined. The original Opera creators brought it back to how it was from day one under the name Vivaldi

Opera was bought by a chinese company, not google...

Google bought it first, but when they completely ruined the great browser, they sold it to the Chinese
Vivaldi is the work of the original creators of Opera. All current browsers are based on the old Opera design, as is Chrome.

[Varta]

Worgarthe, Varta: Now that I think about it, you're both right. I should have tested Brave and Vivaldi, and Arc, too, I guess. That being said, Vivaldi doesn't have support for certain streaming media codecs that I need so this is why I don't take it seriously.

I have no problems with Vivaldi, it streams everything for me. It's also built on Chromium, so most Chrome add-ons work, although I don't even use them because I don't need them, because everything works perfectly.
When I say it would be on top, I mean the RAM usage and the fact that it's historically the same original Opera, whose design many modern browsers have copied. By the way, I've never used Chrome in my life.

[indy]

All current browsers are based on the old Opera design, as is Chrome.

What?   That statement has zero qualifiers.  Based on what aspect of design?  Interface?  Rendering?  Opera's original rendering was Presto, then Webkit, then Blink/ Chromium.  All very different.

You might mean Mosaic, which pretty much all modern and former browsers share a base with.  Opera definitely did not originate Mosaic, as Opera itself came 4 years after Mosaic had been around.

[Bla bla]

Where's Brave? Who doesn't include Brave browser while comparing popular browsers?

[A]

Google bought it first, but when they completely ruined the great browser, they sold it to the Chinese
Vivaldi is the work of the original creators of Opera. All current browsers are based on the old Opera design, as is Chrome.

What are you talking about? Google did not buy Opera. Opera at one point had their own rendering engine, and they switched to using Google's open source Blink rendering engine to save money as the cost of constantly developing your own was too much. Has nothing to do with Google buying Opera, why would google even bother?

Then Opera got bought by the Chinese, and the founders of Opera created Vivaldi, which is still based on Google's open source Blink engine(aka chromium).

All current browsers are not based on old Opera design, that is nonsense. Today most browsers with exception of firefox come from KDE Konqueror which made KHTML engine, which then got forked into webkit than that got forked into Blink