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.
This replicates a user multitasking - writing in one window, and researching in another, for example. For the final test, I opened up each browser twice, and launched 20 tabs in each instance. I opened three copies apiece of each website from the 20-tab test. Next, to really tax each browser I opened a whopping 60 tabs in Chrome, Firefox and Edge. This time around, I kept the initial 10 tabs, then added 10 more from equally demanding sites: eBay, Best Buy, the New York Times, Disney Plus and Google Stadia, to name a few. When a browser has a ton of tabs open, rather than try to run each one simultaneously, it will often prioritize and optimize data in order to save RAM. The second step was to see how each browser handled massive amounts of data. From there, all I had to do was monitor memory usage in Windows Task Manager. I used Guest profiles in Chrome and Edge, and a “clean” profile in Firefox, in order to prevent extensions or bookmarks from clogging things up.
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