Which uses RAM more efficiently?

[graylocks]

my Mini G4 is doing it's best with its maxed out 1 GB RAM but she does get bogged down.

i generally keep Firefox and Safari open. both of them seem need a couple of hundred MBs to run with the tabs i have open. would it be gentler on my system to run one browser with multiple tabs or two browsers with about 3 tabs each?

[mattkime]

i'd use safari 4.

[graylocks]

mattkime wrote:
i'd use safari 4.

i am using Safari 4 but if i had to lose one it wouldn't be FF. it has too many add-ons i've come to depend upon.

however, are you suggesting one browser would be better than two?

[mattkime]

i'm in the same boat. safari 4 is _much_ better at memory management. its probably the best (and fastest) browser out there at the moment. at the same time, i need firefox for dev.

thats might not be a clear cut response to your question but it leaves the choice to you.

[M A V I C]

Close windows you're not using. The wife's PB only has 1.25GB available and it's maxed out. Leaving gmail open sucks up 30% of her CPU. Flash and ajax can both cause nasty problems in both browsers.

I'd probably go with Safari and just restart it often and keep minimal windows open.

[Jimmypoo]

Don't rely on Safari 4 if you use Mail.app.

Why don't you just use tabs? I often have 4 Safari windows open, sometimes 10+ tabs each?

You want to try Google Chrome? At least it doesn't mess with Mail.app. Let me know if you do, as
I have it. 10.8MB in a zip file. The April 5th version.

[jdc]

safari 4 works fine with my Mail?

[graylocks]

Jimmypoo wrote:
Don't rely on Safari 4 if you use Mail.app.

Why don't you just use tabs? I often have 4 Safari windows open, sometimes 10+ tabs each?

You want to try Google Chrome? At least it doesn't mess with Mail.app. Let me know if you do, as
I have it. 10.8MB in a zip file. The April 5th version.

what does Safari do to Mail?

i do use tabs, i just like to have my 'work' browser tabs in FF and my 'play' browser tabs in Safari. i was just wondering if i was hurting myself by using two browsers instead of one.

i posted a few days ago about my mini slowing down. i've done a lot of clean up and at the moment am booted from a cloned external. things are definitely peppier but i don't know if it's because the HD is faster, i only have one browser open with a minimal amount of tabs, or i cleaned out a lot of junk.

later tonight i'm going to wipe the internal clean and reclone. we'll see if the newly optimized drive is then happier.

what do you like about Chrome?

[N-OS X-tasy!]

One little-known factoid about OS X is that each icon on the desktop is actually a separate open window and is treated as such by the OS. Having multiple icons on your desktop (not to mention on the desktops of other logged-in user accounts) can quickly eat up system resources.

[kj]

Having two browsers open is most certainly less memory-efficient than having one, even if you have exactly the same total number of things open.

You could check to see how much each scenario takes in activity monitor, if you want to be absolutely sure.

For PC, I like Chrome quite a bit, but I probably wouldn't bother on mac. kj.