Now that I have all the popular web browsers on my Windows XP 64 PC, I can do many side by side comparisons. See my previous post for a kind of performance test. Here is another one.
I opened all browsers and opened 5 tabs with same set of pages. Navigated through those sites for a while. Left it open overnight. Browsed a bit more. Set all browsers to the same 5 web pages on each tab. Look at the picture below for memory usage.
Internet Explorer: 136 MB main memory and 300 MB VM Size.
Safari: 78 MB main memory and 83 MB VM Size.
Firefox: 55 MB main memory and 42 MB VM Size.
Opera: 53 MB main memory and 53MB VM Size.
Overall, FireFox is the clear winner here. Based on previous performance test and this test, FireFox is definitely the overall winner. The last time I used FireFox which was more than 2 years ago, my experience with performance was not that good. I stopped using it. Now I see that it improved a lot.
Would be interesting to see how FF 3.0 and Opera 9.5 would do in your test. BTW is there no 64bit version of FF for Windows ?