Which browser uses less RAM? If you have a computer with limited RAM, choosing the right browser is crucial. Some browsers consume more RAM than others, which can slow down your computer and prevent you from running other applications simultaneously. Additionally, if your RAM is overloaded, it may cause your computer to crash.
Today, we will answer the question that many have been pondering: which browser uses less RAM?
We will take a look at six popular browsers, examine their RAM usage, and rank them from least to most RAM consumption.
Microsoft Edge had the lowest overall RAM usage, while Opera wasn't far behind, using less RAM than some of the more well-known names.
The Brave browser offers decent performance, so we can confidently recommend it if you're looking for a resource-efficient browser.
On the other hand, Chrome was disappointing; yes, it’s fast, but that’s partly because it consumes a lot of RAM.
Firefox didn't perform well either. Lastly, there isn't much data on Safari since it's not available on Windows, but one test showed it also uses a lot of RAM.
Which browser uses less RAM?
These browsers are ranked by their RAM consumption from least to most:
1. Microsoft Edge
People generally don't prefer Microsoft Edge; the reason for this is, of course, that Internet Explorer was slow and frustrating. It was only popular in the early days of the internet as the default browser on Windows before worthy competitors like Chrome and Firefox emerged.
There are certainly many legitimate reasons for not favoring Microsoft Edge. Microsoft practically imposes it on you as the default browser on Windows, whether during installation or when opening links, and nobody likes things being forced upon them.
Additionally, Edge has a lot of ads.
However, Edge is a complete improvement over Internet Explorer; it’s faster, more secure, and smoother.
Moreover, it has many features that reduce RAM usage. For example, Edge automatically puts inactive tabs to sleep after one hour of inactivity by default.
You can also change the time before tabs go to sleep, with the shortest possible time being just 30 seconds.
This frees up RAM consumption.
With 10 empty tabs open in the browser, it only uses 790 MB of RAM.
With four tabs open for different tasks (YouTube video, Reddit video, a blog, and WhatsApp Web), it consumes only 825-900 MB of RAM.
Opening 20 empty tabs uses only 1.2 GB of RAM.
This is quite good; while Chrome outperformed Edge with one browser tab open, it fell significantly behind when additional tabs were opened.
2. Opera
Opera is known as a lightweight and simple browser, lacking unnecessary features that could slow down your computer. In fact, it has emerged as a major competitor in the lightweight browser category when measuring RAM consumption.
With 10 empty tabs open in the browser, it used 899 MB of RAM, and 1.5 GB with 20 tabs open. With four tabs open for different tasks, it consumes only 850-950 MB of RAM, which isn't much more than Microsoft Edge.
If you want to manually limit your browser's RAM consumption, consider downloading Opera GX. It's a special version of the Opera browser that comes with useful features, such as CPU and RAM usage limiters.
3. Brave
Next on our list is Brave, a free and open-source browser that prioritizes privacy, security, and speed.
However, it also has the advantage of using slightly less RAM than some of the more popular browsers. With 10 tabs open in the browser, it used 920 MB of RAM.
While this is a bit more than Edge, it is slightly less than Firefox and Chrome.
With three tabs open for different news sites (Fox News, HuffPost, and CNN), it used 662 MB of RAM, which is slightly less than Chrome, which used 681 MB of RAM. In this comparison, Brave was in ad-blocking mode, while Chrome was used without any extensions.
Brave is a good choice when it comes to RAM consumption. The main reasons to choose Brave are that it doesn’t track your data and uses an independent search index instead of Google.
However, the fact that it doesn’t consume much RAM is a significant bonus.
4. Firefox
Determining whether to list Firefox or Chrome first wasn't an easy task, as both popular browsers consume large amounts of RAM.
Some tests show that Firefox uses less RAM than Chrome, while other tests indicate that Firefox uses more RAM than Chrome.
It used slightly less RAM than Chrome with 10 and 20 empty tabs open.
With one empty tab open, it used quite a bit (around 684 MB for Firefox compared to about 423 MB for Chrome). With four tabs open for WhatsApp Web, a Reddit video, a YouTube video, and a blog, it consumed nearly the same amount of RAM as Chrome.
5. Google Chrome
Chrome is one of the worst browsers when it comes to RAM usage. Yes, Chrome is fast, but because of that speed, it’s very heavy on RAM - it aims to maximize RAM efficiency.
Chrome also does a lot of caching; again, while caching can improve load times, it also consumes a significant amount of short-term memory.
For example, Chrome used a massive 1000 MB of RAM with 10 tabs open.
Overall, Chrome is not the preferred browser for those looking to minimize RAM consumption.
6. Safari.
Finally, we have Safari. One test showed that with 10 tabs open, it uses 1200 MB of RAM, which is worse than all other browsers, including Chrome, showing a high degree of inefficiency when it comes to RAM consumption.
Although one user reported that Safari was using 7 GB of RAM with just two tabs open, and that it consistently uses more RAM than Chrome and Firefox, other commenters on the topic confirmed they had similar results.
Conclusion
Which browser uses less RAM? I believe you now have a good understanding of the answer to this question. The best low RAM consumption browsers are Microsoft Edge (surprisingly) and Opera (which isn’t too surprising, as it’s marketed as a lightweight browser).
Meanwhile, the worst browsers are Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, which tend to consume a lot of RAM and can generally slow down your computer if you have limited RAM.
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