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A few years back, I used Internet Explorer
for better compatibility with a number of websites. Moreover, I was
already used to using Internet Explorer, so why bother changing? There
are a quite a few web browsers around these days and they mostly have
their own good and bad points. Whether it’s how many resources they take
up or how quickly they load web pages, to what extra features they have
included or can be added through extension plug-ins. If you’re not
happy with your current browser, there’s really no excuse to not go out
and try other browsers and see what they have to offer.
A little
while back, I used to keep leaving my laptop on when I went to sleep and
in the morning when I went back to the laptop, it was often quite hot
and everything running slowly. I only left Mozilla Firefox running with
some websites loaded which I usually visit. Checking the Task Manager
found that Firefox was eating a lot of memory and
CPU usage was going
up and down. I removed all extensions and themes, tried again by leaving
the laptop on overnight with the same websites open, but still the same
thing.
Luckily Firefox has improved since then and isn’t nearly so resource
hungry, but it got me thinking about which web browsers around today are
better or worse at consuming system resources. We’ve put together a
RAM
and
CPU usage test with
10 websites loaded simultaneously on to
10
different popular web
browsers;
Avant Browser,
FlashPeak SlimBrowser,
Maxthon,
Mozilla Firefox, I
nternet Explorer,
Google Chrome,
Opera,
Green
Browser,
Apple Safari and finally
Pale Moon.
All the browsers are the latest versions at the time of writing and no
extensions or plug-ins were installed apart from Flash which was
required for some of the websites. I used a quad core
CPU reduced to a
single core to better illustrate
CPU usage. The operating system used
was Windows
7 64-bit and the screenshots were taken when all
10 websites
are fully loaded and left to settle for
10 seconds or so. Each tabbed
site was then visited in turn and the maximum
CPU usage was noted.