Firefox themes and memory usage

Yep, more about Firefox. I was looking at some different themes available at the Mozilla site and began to wonder what themes were more taxing on your system RAM. So I did a quick and dirty test (I may look at more accurate methods later. Anyone with a better way is welcome to comment). My Q&D Test consisted of opening Firefox with one page loaded (Google) and switching between themes while watching the process table in Windows Task Manager. As you can see in the screen shot I have the Firefox default 2.0, Plastikfox Crystal SVG 1.5.1, Qute 3 and Noia 2.0 (eXtreme).

Noia and Plasticfox seemed to be the biggest memory users. They each registered from approx. 18,500 - 20,000 KB. Both the Firefox default and Qute 3 stayed at approx. 17,500 KB. Only a difference of 1 or 2.5 megabytes on a system with 1GB of RAM. But of course little bits add up.

I'll have to check out what memory usage it's running under my SuSE and RedHat installs also.

I was also curious as to how it compared with the dreadful Internet Explorer. So I started the beast up and found that it was running on about 14MB. Three or four less than Firefox. Then I opened five tabs in one Firefox window. I often have 5-10 tabs open sometimes in multiple windows. I also loaded five IE windows. With a few different web pages loaded in each tab Firefox weighed in at 34MB. IE on the other hand showed five instances all running at 14-15MB for a total consumption of 70-75MB.

So with Firefox you can browse more at lower cost. Even with ten tabs open I'm only running 40MB.