I’m also going to revisit Opera (I haven’t used this new version yet) and see how it is as a browser compared to Safari, against which it performed nearly identically. I’m going to start using it for daily tasks and see how it holds up. They sponsor Dan Benjamin’s 5by5, which is how I heard about it.

Raven, the new browser for Mac deserves a serious look. The browsers broke out into three groups, as I’ve shown in the table. The extra couple of hundred megabytes can make a big difference if the computer is doing other RAM-intensive work such as running a VM.

People can potentially save even more RAM, if these savings continue linearly with increased usage - e.g. Mac users who do the kind of web browsing I do can save 100 – 200 megabytes by choosing their web browser wisely. Pull up a Wapo article and scroll through it. When Safari opens, if it automatically opens pages that you don't want to open, quit Safari again, then press and hold the Shift key while opening Safari. Open Safari again and try to load the page. If Safari doesn't quit, press Option-Command-Esc to force Safari to quit. Task 2: After finishing task 1, load three more typical sites I use: google mail, google docs, and . If you still can't reload: Press Command-Q to quit Safari. Task 1: Startup the browser, go to in one tab and in another. I double-checked the results by running each test on each browser twice. Disabled all plugins in the browsers, and noted the Real Memory used by several browsers for typical usage. I used my Mac running OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard with all updates). RAM in computers is like kitchen counter space: the more space you have, the less shuffling around you need to do, and the more time you can spend cooking. The Mac is smart and will use every extra leftover bit of RAM to speed everything up. I’m interested in how all my apps perform, not just the web browser. If speed’s what we want, why test RAM usage?

Mac web browsers janked up