Browser War

On a boring Wednesday afternoon, I decided to do the following experiment on the three most popular browsers (for Mac). [Please note that Microsoft's Internet Explorer for Macintosh was stopped back in 2003. (More reading here.)] So, what did I want to see? Well- system memory usage, for starters, and also the number of processor threads used. Here's some standard background information:

Platform: Macintosh
OS: Snow Leopard- Mac OS X 10.6.2
Browsers:
1. Apple Safari 4.0.4, running as 64-bit process
2. Google Chrome 4.0.249.49
3. Mozilla Firefox 3.6

So, I opened each browser and opened a same web-page on all three and checked out the Activity Monitor.

[Left-right: Safari, Firefox and Chrome.]

Interestingly, I found that Firefox was using the most memory (86.3 MB) and threads (17). Safari was slightly lower with 65.2 MB memory usage. Chrome appeared to use the lowest memory (38.5 MB) and almost tricked me to believe that it was the fastest, but then I realized that Chrome uses a supplementary "Google Chrome Helper" which eats-up another 35.6 MB for flash support.

 [Activity Monitor]

So, here's total memory usage (with the same conditions):
Safari: 65.2 MB
Chrome: 77.1 MB
Firefox: 86.3 MB

Verdict: The Apple Safari (even running as 64-bit process) emerged as the fastest browser on the Mac OS X 10.6.2. But, I found a few issues with Safari and Chrome. Safari doesn't support text formatting and flash-related-architecture on some web-pages and Chrome has "unexpectedly quit" on me on many silly occasions. Therefore, I would recommend Mac users to use the new Firefox 3.6 even though it takes up more memory and uses up lot more processor threads than its counterparts; Firefox turned out to be more stable, more compatible with web-pages and now even customizable with themes.

Please let me know your views too. Happy browsing!