After modifying Firefox, I did some resources usage testing of my own using Opera 10.53, Firefox 3.6.3, and Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.

In each browser I opened three tabs: the Home Page, which is a page stored on my hard drive; SENAA International’s Newsletter Page, and SENAA West’s Welcome page.

After opening the pages, I took a reading of memory usage from the Task Manager with the browser open, then minimized and took a reading, then maximized the browser again and took another reading.

Here are the results:

Firefox 3.6.3:
Initial Memory Usage: 129,160 KB
Minimized Memory Usage: 15,344 KB
Maximized Memory Usage: 64,904

Opera 10.53:
Initial Memory Usage: 144,860 KB
Minimized Memory Usage: 13,100 KB
Maximized Memory Usage: 36,000 KB

Internet Explorer 8.0.6001:
Initial Memory Usage: 22,280 KB
Minimized Memory Usage: 22,280 KB
Maximized Memory Usage: 22,284 KB

While I was at it, I visited several sites that are known to be attack sites, which harbor viruses, malware, and drive-by downloads of malware, viruses, and hacking files.

In Firefox, some of the sites infected my machine in spite of the “attack site” warning displayed by Firefox. Luckily my anti-virus program caught and either blocked or deleted the infections.

In Opera, I was infected more often. Again, the anti-virus caught everything, as far as I know.

In Internet Explorer, with default security settings, no infections occurred. IE prevented the sites from opening.

So, the winner and new champion of both memory usage and malware prevention, was Internet Explorer 8.

Firefox came in 2nd place in both resource usage and security.

Opera came in dead last in both categories.

I should mention that I do not work for Microsoft, Mozilla, or Opera. The only interest that I have in the testing was to see for myself, once and for all, which browser is most secure and which browser used the least resources to operate.

It looks like Firefox is falling behind, and with its next version’s design leaning toward “cloud” computing, which is the least secure and most expensive way to go, it looks like Firefox has sold out or the developers are asleep at the wheel.

Either way, it has convinced me that Internet Explorer is the preferred browser in every way that matters.

I felt that I owed it to those who use Firefox and those who are still deciding which browser they should use to post the results of my research.

Anyone running Windows who has a good firewall, anti-virus program, and Task Manager can recreate these tests. Any three Web sites will do for the purpose, as long as you use the same three sites in each browser.

I have the three browsers on my machine, because I am a Web page developer. I use the three browsers to test the behavior of Web pages in each one.

So there you have it. If you doubt my results, do the test yourself. Your results may vary, but they will reveal a similar difference among the three browsers.

I have not tested Google Chrome.

I also did not check the encryption strength of the three browsers, so I don’t know which is the most secure for online business transactions. I do know that Internet Explorer’s encryption strength is 128-bit by default.

Just thought you should know.