Safari uses more RAM than Firefox, and is faster and more reliable

Firefox vs. Safari, the Sequel

written 13 Mar 2008 over dinner

I had posted about my ongoing debate on whether to use Firefox or Safari as my main browser. I had a look at both Firefox 2.0.0.12 and Safari 3.0.4 in Activity Monitor on my Mac (Activity Monitor, for you Windowsers, is similar to Task Manager).

With four tabs open on each — Gmail, Harvest (time tracking software), Google Calendar and Google Reader — Safari was using around 90MB of RAM and Firefox only 74MB. Interesting, as I have a bunch of plugins installed on Firefox and only one in Safari. Safari is still faster, perhaps because of the fact that it’s using more RAM, I don’t know about such things.

Filed Under: how-tos & web design (ing)
Tagged: browsers, Firefox, greatest battles of all time, Safari

5 Comments
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5 people chatting it up...

I used to use FF on the Mac exclusively, but I’ve since switched. I couldn’t handle the slowness once I learned how much faster Safari was.

I still dip into FF from time to time when I’m trying to figure out some tricky problem and need to leverage the plug-ins, but I’ve found that Safari’s Web Inspector, plus the X-Ray and MRI bookmarklets satisfy most of my needs.

When I need to check a layout in the Gecko engine, Camino, not FF, gets the call.

- Jake | 07:12pm 13 Mar 08
[...] cschaper24 wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptI had posted about my ongoing debate on whether to use Firefox or Safari as my main browser. I had a look at both Firefox 2.0.0.12 and Safari 3.0.4 in Activity Monitor on my Mac (Activity Monitor, for you Windowsers, is similar to Task … [...]

- Firefox vs. Safari, the Sequel | How to make a website | 09:05pm 13 Mar 08
Yeah, Firefox’s Web Developer Plugin is so solid…I haven’t really figured out Safari’s Inspector yet. I mostly just use the Web Developer FF Plugin to outline current element.

- nathan | 09:27pm 13 Mar 08
You should really check out Firefox 3 Beta 4, it uses less memory and is faster than Safari:

http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2008/03/firefox-3-beta-4-review/

- Mike Schroepfer | 02:17pm 14 Mar 08
I’m excited for Firefox 3 to come out, but I’m worried about upgrading until it’s ready to roll. As a Web designer I feel like I need to have the most common version available to everyone, you know?

- nathan | 04:14pm 14 Mar 08