Needs double Firefox's system memory
Internet Explorer 8 needs more than double the system memory of its main rival Firefox, and spawns nearly six times the number of processor threads.
Craig Barth, chief technology officer at Devil Mountain Software, a Florida-based maker of PC performance testing software, said that the Beta 2 version of IE8 consumes 52 per cent more memory than its predecessor, IE7, and uses almost three times as many threads.
He said that IE8 was more bloated than a three week corpse of a hippopotamus that had eaten Texas. Barth tested IE8 Beta 2, IE7 and Firefox 3.0.1 in a 10-site scenario that involved media-rich domains such as boston.com, channel9.com, cnet.com, infoworld.com, nytimes.com and others.
IE8 Beta 2 had grabbed 380MB of memory on the 2GB-equipped system running Windows Vista, while IE7 accounted for 250GB and Firefox 3.0.1, the most-recent version of the open-source browser, had taken 159MB. The browser did a little better when run under Windows XP, each browser consumed slightly less memory than in Vista; IE8 Beta 2, but not by much.
Barth points out that IE8 takes as much memory as Windows XP. He had the impression that he browser had been designed for those with multi-core systems rather than legacy systems with just one core.
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Nick Farell
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