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Comment by HugoDias | Hacker News Reader

In the 'real world' when it comes to memory I believe the google chrome is still winning. If you keep these two browsers with more than 10 tabs open for a while (1h+) and then close a few tabs, google chrome will have an immediate reduction in memory usage, unlike Firefox, which continues to consume the same amount.

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If you're on a limited memory machine, like my 2GB netbook, Firefox is the best choice. Chrome is a pig in both the real world and these tests with 768 vs 1521 MB used.

Congratulations to the memshrink team for fixing all the memory leaks in FF 4. Now if they could only do something about the UI responsiveness when multiple intensive tabs are open, I might consider switching back from Chrome on my desktop.

Maybe Firefox simply holds longer on to cached stuff if the system has still free memory? Unless it fails to release it when needed, I would see this as a plus.

Well, it isnt for me. I use Google+ and Youtube frequently and these services consume a LOT of memory. When i close these tabs , Firefox keeps holding this memory space alocated. Generally i need to use some app to remove the 'inactive' memory alocated by FF. I don't think this is a 'plus'.

Why? Unused RAM is just wasted RAM. In an ideal world, we would use all unused RAM for aggressive caching, and release it just before it's needed by something other than caching. That Firefox frees up the memory when you start other apps seems to indicate it does it exactly right.

This was accounted for in the tests (and I think that in general the effect of fragmentation is overstated).

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