Internet Explorer 8: Over 2x “Fatter” than Firefox
For example, on our Dell OptiPlex 745 (Core 2 Duo @ 2.66GHz) Vista/XP test bed with 2GB of RAM, IE 8 consumed just under 380MB of memory during a 10-site, multi-tab browsing scenario of popular general media, technical media and humor-related Web destinations. By contrast, IE 7 consumed just under 250MB rendering this same workload, while Firefox 3.01 put both IE versions to shame by completing the same browsing scenario in just 159MB of RAM.
The story gets worse for IE 8 when you examine the number of threads spawned to complete the scenarios. Under Firefox, the count never exceed 29 concurrent threads. IE 7 spawned a hefty 65 execution threads, while IE 8 tried to choke the life out of the CPU with a massive 171 concurrent threads.
Such massively-threaded products will likely feel more at home on the 4, 8 and 16-core systems of tomorrow, but for right now they represent the worst kind of code bloat.