IE7 beat the hell out of Firefox's memoy managment?!

[Superfly]

Check this out guys:

The new IE7 remains a small download, at least by modern standards, and certainly by Microsoft's: under 13 MB, which over broadband connections still takes less than a minute. But the real conservation takes place with respect to the memory footprint; and here, Microsoft's familiarity with its own operating system pays off yet again. In our initial tests, when we loaded four of TG Publishing's own front pages into memory, then checked memory consumption in Task Manager, both IE7 Beta 3 and Firefox 1.5.4 consumed about 64 MB of system memory, with Firefox slightly more than IE7. But when both programs were minimized, something almost magic happened: IE7 released most of its memory back to the system; Firefox did not. In a minimized state, Firefox still consumed 57 MB of memory, while IE7 dropped to below 10 MB.

Upon restoration, Firefox stayed put at around 57 MB, but IE7 recalled page content only when necessary. As we clicked on tabs, IE7 gradually reclaimed more memory, but only expanded to a footprint below 31 MB, with the same four pages loaded as before.

Source: http://www.iexbeta.com/

[rewt]

There is no magic in it. My program NVTray does the same thing. In fact, all .NET applications do. Open it up, and it appears to use 12MB of RAM (It doesn't, it is a misrepresentation of memory usage in Microsoft's task manager). You see when you minimize that application it goes down to less than 1MB memory usage, to approximately 512-756KB.

IE7 seems to be doing something similar here. Or perhaps it is doing something else, such as paging data to disk and pulling it back when needed.

[Superfly]

I dont care how they do it ;) what important to me is that it works very well.

many thanks for the explanation though.

[rewt]

No problem :)

Actually I just noticed my Opera browser does the same thing as IE7. When I minimize it, it goes from 73MB (I have a lot of tabs open) to 10MB.

So maybe, like .NET applications, it allocates a certain amount of memory ahead of time in case it needs it. When minimizing (or another application happens to needs that memory space) it frees all that allocated memory up.