Which browser is the most "memory hungry" one?

Safari and Chrome are about the same here (sum up all the Chrome rendering processes; it's not just the app). Firefox is a turd. Opera does not exist.

I thought it was safari but I just tested to see and chrome actually used more than safari. I only opened one tab and saw how much the free RAM dropped in iStat Pro

For me, it's not so much a matter of how much memory the app uses as much as if it will give it back.

Safari memory use balloons for me no matter how many tabs are open. Closing tabs doesn't get me the memory back (and I've had plenty of cases where I open another app that uses a lot of memory and it just crashes things).

Whereas Chrome will at least give me the memory back when I start closing tabs.

But this is just my use cases... it could be something specific to my machine; I don't know.

Opera, lol

I tested Safari, Chrome Beta, Chrome Canary, Opera, and Firefox on Lion and I consistently found both Chrome Beta + Chrome Canary using less RAM than Safari, Opera, and Firefox. Safari used a ridiculous amount of RAM even when few tabs were open.

TheJing said:

Haha! Yea, I put 4 options by mistake so I just put Opera up there even though I know no one uses it.

Click to expand...

Opera is actually pretty popular.

TheJing said:

Haha! Yea, I put 4 options by mistake so I just put Opera up there even though I know no one uses it.

Click to expand...

ehhh ya, I have it along with Chrome and Safari and find that Opera uses the least amount of memory. Built-in flash block, stackable tabs and pop-up visual previews are good features, no where near as fast as chrome though.

I have ram in my laptop so applications can take advantage of it

The more ram it uses the faster the browsing should be.

Now if there's a memory leak, that's a whole different story.