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It really is leaner and meaner than either Chrome or Firefox. Microsoft has made a big to-do about Edge being a real contender in the Web-browsing space, and my results suggest that the company isn’t just blowing smoke. These figures are roughly double what the 20-tab test required, which is not terribly surprising - except for Chrome, which seems to be a little bit better about optimizing data across two windows. On the final test, with 40 tabs open across two instances (20 tabs apiece), Edge required 2.5 GB RAM altogether, while Chrome needed 2.8 GB and Firefox needed 3.0 GB. On the other hand, not every user needs 60 tabs open simultaneously, so consider whether this use-case might apply to you. The results here were much starker than the 20-tab test, as Firefox required a whole extra gig of memory, compared to Edge. With the 20-tab test, Chrome performed the weakest, eating up 1.8 GB RAM, compared to Firefox at 1.6 GB and Edge at only 1.4 GB.Įdge continued to perform the best when I loaded 60 tabs in a single browser window, taking up 2.9 GB of RAM, versus 3.7 GB for Chrome and 3.9 GB for Firefox. But to beat Google at its own game is still impressive. That Edge made such a great showing is less surprising when you remember that Microsoft’s browser now runs on the same Chromium architecture as Chrome. The real surprise, however, was Edge, weighing in at only 873 MB of memory. Running 10 tabs took up 952 MB of memory in Chrome, while Firefox took up 995 MB. That's why browsers need a lot of RAM, particularly as you open more tabs. Your computer needs RAM to render text, images, music, videos - essentially, all the things you find on a website.
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Edge: How I testedĪ quick refresher: Random access memory, or RAM, is a place to store data for short-term processing. Microsoft Edge used up the least RAM in every single test. In fact, Chrome was mostly in the middle, while Firefox used up the most RAM overall. Despite its reputation for being a real RAM hog, Chrome did not perform the worst. I tested Chrome against Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge, and my findings were quite interesting.
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