Although the web-browser market is filled with several browsers, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome seem to be the most popular ones, due to their high flexibility. Among these two, Chrome is slowly capturing the overall market share on the expense of Firefox and IE due to Google’s aggressive promotional campaigns.

Although Chrome is well known for its speed and is supposedly much more light weight when compared to Firefox, the recent updates to Firefox (v8) reveal an entirely different story. The Mozilla built browser, which used to be notorious for being the most CPU & memory consuming browser since v2.0 is now shockingly much more light and tab-friendly than Chrome (v15).

Below are some test results conducted.

The following tests were conducted by experts in a very professional environment. Please do not try them at your home.

Firefox Performance Graph

This is my graph showing the memory and CPU consumption by Firefox with 20 tabs opened. I am using 13 add-ons, with GPU acceleration enabled.

RAM consumed: 402 MB

CPU: 0.39%

Even the CPU consumption of Firefox which once used to be annoyingly high, is now close to nothing. There is almost negligible CPU usage, even with Hardware Acceleration enabled!

If you are wondering about speeds, chrome is still fast, but Firefox is catching up big time.The page loading in Firefox this time is almost as fast as chrome

For Chrome fans, now this is our “fast” and “light” Chrome browser. I have only 7 (yep, ONLY 7) tabs opened in a single window. Have a look at the memory and CPU consumption:

CPU: 7.4%

RAM consumed: 600+ MB

The reality behind the speed of Chrome is that it stores truck loads of Cache in your PC, unlike Firefox where you can manage cache levels. So that when you browse in chrome it will just update the cache and site actually loads from your hard-disk, which makes you feel its fast. By the way, did I mention that Chrome has been under really heavy criticism for tracing back your activity on the web to Google servers so that they can sell ads better? Firefox may be tad slower than Chrome, but it doesn’t eat your RAM for breakfast and doesn’t track every tiny web activity of yours.

So, if you want to surf a wee-bit more, and not want to throttle up your CPU even for the silliest site loaded, and have a reasonably decent net connection, Firefox 8, which shipped with the latest bunch of improvements is the way to go! Try it yourself.