You may agree or disagree with the choice the Firefox developers made, but they are testing different things (there is a setting to disable this behaviour if I remember correctly). So memory management is different in that case for Firefox. Thus you can’t just look at the memory usage of the browser and say it doesn’t clean up the memory. I’m just wondering because I noticed the same things and benchmarks usually don’t depend on the above mentioned things so that might explain it.Īlso with the memory management tests, I think Firefox keeps closed tabs in memory so when you choose to ‘open a recently closed tab’ it will just load the rendered page from memory I think. I also wonder about the page-load tests if they load the same page from a proxy or something like that, what about ads ? Does it load the same ad ? What about DNS ? Or do they just run the test 25 times, clearing the cache each time and hope for the best ? I couldn’t find how they actually test that though. Take the ‘eight tabs’-test, Firefox when you start it up with ‘tabs open’ will first load the page from cache and than refresh to see if something changed.

Knowing a bit how Firefox handles these things, I would say it very much depend on how you test. They may be fast, but don’t load the whole page. At least they added a ‘reliabilty benchmark/proper page loads’ section which shows that Chrome and IE don’t always actually load the page properly.

Firefox os x lion