A few years ago, the gaming company Corsair ran an interesting ad In this ad, a man in a Google Chrome shirt greedily eats a RAM-shaped cookie, while another man in an Adobe Photoshop shirt takes a bite of the cookie and puts the rest back

This is an indictment of Chrome, even if it lacks significant context By the way, Google Chrome really does destroy computer memory But at the same time, it got me thinking: does Chrome really eat up RAM? If so, do other popular Internet browsers take a more conservative approach?

I tested Chrome against Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge, and despite its reputation for being a RAM hog, Chrome's performance was not the worst In fact, Chrome was about in the middle, Firefox consumed the most RAM overall, and Microsoft Edge consumed the least RAM across all tests

A quick refresher: Random Access Memory (RAM) is where data is stored for short-term processing Computers need RAM to render text, images, music, videos, and basically everything else on a website Therefore, browsers require a lot of RAM, especially the more tabs you have open

To find out how much RAM each browser requires, I shut down all unnecessary programs on my PC and launched one browser at a time In that browser, I opened 10 tabs that I might come across in my daily life: Google, Tom's Guide, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube (Tom's Guide, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, etc (I also opened Corsair's website)

I used the Guest profile for Chrome and Edge, and a "clean" profile for Firefox to keep extensions and bookmarks out of the way From there, I simply monitored memory usage with Windows Task Manager

The second step was to see how each browser handled large amounts of data When a browser has a large number of tabs open, instead of trying to run each tab simultaneously, it often prioritizes and optimizes the data to conserve RAM In this case, we kept the first 10 tabs and added 10 more tabs for equally loaded sites such as eBay, Best Buy, New York Times, Disney Plus, and Google Stadia

Next, to load each browser, we opened a whopping 60 tabs in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge; from the 20-tab test, we opened three of each website; from the 20-tab test, we opened three of each website In the last test, each browser was opened twice, each time launching 20 tabs This replicated the user's multitasking, for example, writing in one window and doing research in another

Chrome consumed 952 MB of memory to launch 10 tabs, and Firefox consumed 995 MB But the real surprise was Edge, which consumed only 873 MB of memory; that Edge achieved such a result is not so surprising considering that Microsoft's browser now runs on the same Chromium architecture as Chrome But beating Google is still impressive

In a 20-tab test, Chrome was the weakest, consuming 18 GB of RAM, compared to 16 GB for Firefox and just 14 GB for Edge

With 60 tabs loaded in a single browser window, Chrome and Firefox consumed 37GB and 39GB of RAM, respectively, while Edge maintained the best performance, consuming 29GB of RAM The results are much clearer than in the 20-tab test, where Firefox required a whole extra gig of memory compared to Edge On the other hand, not all users need to have 60 tabs open at the same time, so consider whether this use case applies to you

In the last test, with 40 tabs open in two instances (20 tabs each), Edge required 25 GB of RAM overall, while Chrome required 28 GB and Firefox 30 GB These numbers are roughly double the numbers required in the 20-tab test, which is not too surprising However, Chrome seems to be a bit better about optimizing data across two windows

Microsoft touts Edge as a real contender in the web browsing arena, but my results suggest that the company isn't just blowing smoke up its ass; Edge is leaner and meaner than Chrome and Firefox, and it's also more efficient than Chrome and Firefox The difference is not something you will see overnight, especially on systems with lots of RAM, but it will be significant for lower-performance PCs, especially lightweight laptops

It is important to remember that my tests are not highly scientific; RAM usage will vary somewhat from system to system, and will vary greatly depending on what websites you visit and which extensions you use

Does this make Edge the "best" web browser? Not necessarily A browser should certainly be lightweight, but it should load your favorite websites without problems, run the extensions you need, and protect users from malware and other malware We didn't evaluate those factors in this test, so you'll have to decide for yourself if it's worth switching

However, we did find that Chrome is not as inferior in RAM as we expected and that Microsoft Edge beats both Chrome and Firefox