Recently, the much awaited versions of two of the greatest browsers ever made were released. Opera 9.5 with its brand new theme and a much faster browsing experience and Firefox 3.0 which is claimed to be the fastest browser on the planet.

I personally use both the browsers because they both have their pros and cons. Opera for me is basically a “one package” for all things. It has a inbuilt E-mail client, IRC software, RSS reader, Torrent Client, Notes manager and some widgets (which I am not particularly fond of).

Firefox on the other hand comes with a great and enthusiastic team of developers and coders who are constantly developing new extensions/addons to this great browser. They make like easier for a webmaster and for many other people.

So, I decided to do a little test to compare the RAM usage of both as my computer is not really overflowing with RAM and the single difference between my computer running and crawling is of RAM. I have many applications open simultaneously and therefore would want some browser which takes the minimum amount of RAM.

For doing some kind of benchmarking, I restarted both the browsers so that the memory consumed in the previous sessions does not affect the results. After the restart, I opened five very popular websites on both these browsers. Here is an image showing those websites:

Opera Vs Firefox

Now, the second job is to see the task manager to get to know which browser is using the lesser amount of RAM. Here is a screenshot for that:

momory_firefox_opera_comparison

I can clearly see that firefox is taking far lesser amount of RAM right now and therefore, Firefox clearly wins in this comparison. But I would like to point to my fellow readers that Opera has got loads of other functions that might be consuming more memory. (The EMAIL client, IRC, RSS reader, Notes etc). Therefore, considering the fact that any average email client will also use some sort of memory overhead, I would prefer Opera because everything fits so neatly into its interface.

Anyways, the decision is purely yours. If you do not use those other functions then I would suggest using Firefox, but if you are using those other functions by additional applications then I think Opera wins hands down.