In browser war, there are big three player in this game. The first one and my favorite is Firefox. Anyway, it seems like Firefox is beating by IE 7 and Opera 9. While other competiters trying to promote its usability and resource usage, Firefox is still focusing on extensibility and performance. One big problem here is not performance but resource consumption. In other words, Firefox is growing up and it is not for machine with main memory lower than 512 anymore. Well, to make it more fair, we are engineer and we talk by exact value. I found a comparison. Let's skip to the resource usage. The article measured memory usage in MB with no pages load on MS Windows XP Professional SP2. The result turned out that Opera 9.0 consumed 53 MB followed by Firefox 2 Beta 1 at 42 MB and IE 7 Beta 3 at 24 MB. After loading 6 tabs, Firefox 2 Beta 1 ate 73 MB, IE 7 Beta 3 at 70 MB, and Opera 9.0 at 52 MB. The last performance test is startup time in seconds. Opera 9.0 was the winner in this criteria while Firefox 2 Beta 1 is the slowest one.

Sorry, I have to say that Firefox 2 Beta 1 is not the best one in term of performance anymore. This is a tradeoff of extensibility, portability, feature and performance. XUL might not be a good idea for big application like Firefox.

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