People are always looking for the best option, a web browser is not an exception.
For net surfers, the browser is pretty much the most used app. It’s a no brainer that they want to have the best app on the market. In this case, they often put Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox into consideration.
Chrome users often complain about high RAM usage. For a refresher, RAM is short-term memory. The more tabs you’re using in the browser, the more Chrome will hog your RAM space, which in turn slows down your computer performance. If you open too many tabs, the performance drop will be noticeable even for a high-end PC.
Mozilla Firefox—the competitor—makes such an enticing claim saying it uses 30% less RAM compared to Chrome. If this is true, Mozilla Firefox won’t slow down PC as much as Google Chrome does. But, is that really the case?
To answer this question, we did an independent test to see which one is truly the most efficient. Before that though, let’s take a look at other differences between Firefox and Chrome.
User Interface
Both Firefox and Chrome are pleasant to the eyes In terms of UI design. In our opinion, however, Firefox UI is more ‘delightful’.
More vivid buttons and simpler setting management give the impression of user-friendliness.
Customizability
Firefox is open-source, meaning everyone is free to customize various things including elements disposition of the User Interface—yes, you can further customize the UI to your liking—and the browser’s general behavior.
Chrome, on the other hand, is not entirely open-source. While it’s based on the Chromium browser (which is open-source), it’s still proprietarily google-owned. Therefore, it’s less flexible in terms of customization.
For casual users, nothing wrong with Google Chrome. Yet for enthusiasts, the opportunity to customize Firefox to their liking is too good to miss.
RAM usage
The Mozilla official website advertises Firefox as 1.77 times more efficient than Chrome. Of course, as objective folks, we can’t just take their word for it. An individual test is necessary.
As we’ve mentioned before, we can measure how efficient an app is by looking at their average RAM usage. Take a look at the image below. Please note that the number of tabs and the websites visited is the same for both browsers. Furthermore, all the optional extensions—which can also consume RAM space—are disabled.
The computer OS used for the test is Windows 10 Home. From the result above, we can conclude that Firefox indeed uses less RAM than Chrome. Keep in mind that different machines and/or Operating System may result in varying outcomes. The installation of addons or extensions may also influence.
Internet speed
We found that the internet speeds for both Firefox and Chrome show similar results. No one comes out on top in this case.
Google Chrome has more features that might come in handy
If you are looking to “cast” a YouTube video into your Smart TV, then Google Chrome is the better choice.
Casting is done by pressing the cast button to play a video on a separate device instead of the device you’re holding. For example, you can cast a movie you found on Netflix from your laptop into your smart TV.
Firefox, on the other hand, doesn’t support casting for PC and laptop users. But recently, Mozilla adds this feature for Firefox installed on Android.
In addition, the selection of extensions found is chrome is much more variable, with over 50,000 extensions to choose from. With them, you can do many things such as showing LinkedIn profiles in Gmail or determining hex color codes from any element you found on a page.
Conclusion
So, which one is better? To be fair, no clear winner can be determined. As a rule of thumb, if you want simplicity, customizability, and efficiency, Firefox is the way to go. If you’re looking for more features and ease of use, you may want to consider Google Chrome.