CPU Load: Firefox vs Opera vs MS IE
Till yesterday I was yet another one very happy FireFox user. Recently I started to notice that Firefox leads to very high CPU load when you open a lot of tabs. But yesterday I got the real firefox killer. It came from IBM as information portal for Linux on Power architecture.
Everyone is welcome to click on this page http://openpowerproject.org/us/index.php and watch how your CPU load goes through the roof.
Lets analize it a bit further. Here are the screen shots of that page opened in Opera and MS IE 6.0 and the third screen shot shows CPU load that Opera and IE take to display that page.
(for IE, look at ‘wine-preloader’ process, because I have IE running under wine on Linux.)
 MS IE 6.0 |
 Opera 8.0 |
 CPU Load |
Lets now open this page in Firefox and see what would happen with CPU load. (note: there are 2 screen shots, the second one with only FireFox running.)
 Page in FF |
 CPU load for FF |
 CPU Load for FF (other apps closed) |
I took output of strace for all 3 browsers. Looks like all 3 are doing the same things, but FF does not do “the right thing” 
!
And by the way, that page is “great” peice web desing from IBM … clearly , they checked it only for IE …. You can the JavaScript code resposible for the mess here.
Hope that helps!
Added: I filed a for bug this with mozilla.