Just played around with Safari for a few hours and I saw that it used an extreme among of resources. At one point it hit 200mb ram.Tabs that are open in both tabs; front page of digg.com, slashdot.org, google.org and a loaded rss feed of engadget. Also notice that I have around 15 extensions in firefox. Screen taken right after tabs were opened.[…] Thanks to Decon89 for providing this nice story on Digg (more than 1527 Diggs).
What other user say about this:
jamesburton1: Stop using Windows, easy solution.
glide256: If you want a quick little javascript test, goto this site.
http://mootools.net/slickspeed/
It tests the CSS3 selectors in various javascript frameworks.
nilp: Ok, I decided to do an experiment.
I created an XP VM with 192MB RAM (how did we ever live with so little RAM?). I installed Safari 3 and Firefox on it and opened up 10 tabs in Safari, going to such standard sites as apple.com, google news, cnn etc. I was able to push Safari usage up to more than 120MB, and total committed memory was 230MB.
Then I opened up Firefox, and the memory assigned to Safari dropped to 40MB.
You can try this yourself.
Safari appears to be doing some kind of aggressive caching in memory, but frees up much of the memory if another process needs it.
In the *nix world (and I believe in Vista – can anyone confirm that?), the memory management means that processes will use as much memory as they can get (run top in Linux and look at the wired and active memory to see the real memory usage), but they will release the inactive memory assigned to them if the OS needs it for another process. This means in *nix OSs like Linux and OS X, free memory is wasted memory since it’s not doing any work. It also means that *nix users don’t spend the same amount of time obsessing over individual application memory usage. Rather we look at the big picture, checking our page outs for excessive memory usage.
It looks like Safari manages its memory like this in XP.
In other words, be like a *nix user … don’t worry about Safari using up memory. It’s not going to take it from processes that need it.
The only thing is, I might be talking crap since I don’t know anything about memory management in XP or Vista.
M1THR4ND1R: Just downloaded Safari to try it out. Here’s how it went:
I put it on, i try a website. I type the address and hit ctrl+enter because I’m used to that adding the http://www. and .com parts to the URL i’ve typed in (works in Firefox, IE and Opera) But nope, doesn’t work. Oh well I guess that’s acceptable. I type the whole address in then. The site doesn’t work like it should, a lot of text not appearing at all. All right, guess I just hit a page that doesn’t happen to work with it. I try another website, same thing happens. I try google, Safari crashes. I restart safari and check a few other websites which do work. I check the memory usage. I have opera (which i normally use) on at the same time and I notice safari is taking up twice the memory that opera does. The only noticable speed difference was that safari felt a tad slower than Opera.
So yeah, I guess I won’t be switching browsers anytime soon.
Wenz: That’s funny, I find the exact opposite to be true. Safari for Windows is not only FAST but takes up less memory than my FF does. I’m still using FF as my main browser, but I like that Safari is available to me now.
thripper: It might eat a lot of memory (even tough it’s hard to tell how much memory it actually uses) but it seems to be faster than anything I’ve ever used. Still my main browser will remain Firefox because of the all mighty extensions
BrandonMills: I use Opera on my Mac because I can’t stand Safari. Opera works well enough with most pages, but unless the website is expecting Mac traffic, Safari breaks on nearly everything. God help me with the way Safari does passwords and certificates.
This move is a few years behind, Apple. You can’t have the web conform to your browser when it’s not cross-platform. My question is, where is the Linux version? It’s a good first step, but you’re still slackin.
BenjaminWill: iTunes takes ages to load on Windows? It comes up near-instantly on my iMac and MacBook, its up and ready to run in full CoverFlow mode within 2 seconds and I have over 5,000 songs in my library. Windows just sucks ass, don’t blame Apple for the sluggish performance of Microsoft’s operating system.
seraph82: Jeeeez! Safari is *ugly!*
sontags: i recently switched to mac and hates the fact that i have to use windows at work… so i got safari today. and… what a crap! they got to fix a lot to get this thing working! the pub.beta isn’t more then a silly draft.
DwightSchruted3: Chuck Norris once used Safari. He got so pissed he killed it, resurrected it, and killed it again. (uninstalled it, installed it, and uninstalled it again) Safari is so slow just like iTunes. Why use this when i have Firefox?
glide256: Ram is there to be used. If programs don’t use your ram why would you even need so much ram? Also, minimize safari and see what happens to it’s ram usage. It plummets to single digits of ram. Does FF do that? Does IE do that? No they don’t.
I can open up 500+ comment article on FF at work and it’s really slow. It’s not rendering because at work I’m connected on at least a T1. On safari massive digg pages load much faster. That’s the difference to me.
This is like the biggest non-story ever. It’s not like half of you don’t have 2+ gigs of ram.
stockjones: Too funny, look at the speed chart. Look where they place Opera. Granted safari is fast Ill give it that, but Opera is a tad faster than Firefox, and many tests confirmed that IE6 at the time yes IE6 was faster than Firefox 1.5. Today many would agree that Firefox 2 and IE6/7 are similar in speed, but man they make Opera sound like a hog which is so far from the truth.
They say Firefox launches faster than IE on windows? lol.
din100: True It’s load pages faster than Firefox or IE but taking up way too much memory though, http://i18.tinypic.com/54jzdbr.jpg (all browsers using 2 tabs of same web page )
Opera is the best in terms of memory and speed, but I still can’t move away from firefox 😦
Billions: And Safari using more memory to do things faster is bad? Maybe that’s how it loads pages faster. I can’t believe someone posted and called that ‘bad memory management.’ The effect for the user is faster web browsing. Who cares unless you’re a weird memory miser who watches/hawks over system stats? Many users might enjoy how the app is USING the RAM to increase performance.
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