Browser Refresh Wars (FF2,IE7,Safari-Win, and Opera9)

I've been working on a small project all day, and I noticed after an hour or so, my machine was running considerably slower. IE was responding fine, but FireFox was dragging its self around.

I checked the memory usage, and FF2 was 300,000+!!! IE was a strong ~30,000, so I was a bit confused. Both browsers had the same page opened, but FF was freaking consuming ridiculous amounts of memory, so I decided to investigate.

Looks like FF2 increases its memory usage everytime you refresh a page - even if the page is in cache. IE keeps its memory usage pretty stable.

I decided to test 4 popular browsers with a single page and see how they do after 5 refreshes (most web-designer/developers do some serious refreshing all day long).

<b>Browser</b> <b>Starting</b> <b>Refresh 1</b> <b>Refresh 2</b> <b>Refresh 3</b> <b>Refresh 4</b> <b>Refresh 5</b> Firefox2 31,536k 38,432k 41,912k 47,068k 51,564k 56,700k Internet Explorer 7 29,316k 30,244k 29,552k 30,356k 29,752k 30,212k Safari for Windows 31,408k 34,036k 34,624k 34,880k 35,588k 36,132k Opera 9 24,356k 28,788k 28,924k 29,020k 29,020k 29,116k