Firefox vs. Opera: Round One

As per Herman’s request, I’ve done some very simple tests to get a feel for differences between Firefox and Opera. Two things I’ve looked at this time were Load Times and Memory Footprints. These are completely objective observations and I have not changed/fudged any numbers. How did it go?

Test 1: Load Times
For this test I took out an ordinary wrist watch and opened up my start menu. I began timing from when I clicked the “Opera” or “Firefox” icons. Both were set to load to Speed Dial pages which are my preferred start up pages. After recording these, I also opened up Gmail in each browser (not simultaneously). I’ve been getting some extreme lag whenever I opened Gmail up in Firefox (I think because of my various and numerous Gmail-related extensions) so I thought it’d be a good thing to test between Opera (with minimal customization) and a fully tweaked Firefox. Do take these results with a grain of salt, since my Firefox has been loaded up with many extensions and Opera is running from a mostly-fresh install. Nevertheless, here are the results.

Test 2: Footprint
For this test I set up a very simple experiment. I opened both Firefox and Opera at the same time. I then recorded the memory (RAM) usage over a period of 20 minutes while I opened up new tabs to my most frequently used websites every 5 minutes, while keeping previous tabs open. This was done to monitor how much extra RAM is used by each browser for every additional tab displaying identical pages. I also have observed that Firefox has a tendency to really become a memory hog after extended sessions even if tabs have been closed (I’m guessing it has to do with cache and other stuff that Firefox keeps track of until it closes/restarts). Here is what I found out.

Discussion:
Not surprisingly Opera won out in every single test, and by a considerable amount too. To be fair, these tests were done on a Firefox install that has been collecting junk (read: extensions, cookies, user settings, etc…) for several years now and an Opera install I made last night. It’s expected that the fresh software will run a little faster than the cluttered one, but still, the differences are too big for it to be justified by new vs. old installs.

Verdict: Opera wins over Firefox for quick loads and less memory whoring.

Note: For reference’s sake, here are my system specs for the machine I tested these things on:

• CPU: Intel Pentium 4 (3.0 GHz)
• OS: Microsoft Vista Ultimate (32 bit)
• RAM:  1.0 Gb
• Video Card: ATI Radeon 9550 / X1050 Series