WaterFox vs IE...More Lightweight?

[WyattWhiteEagle]

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In Windows Task Manager, WaterFox has 4 processes and Internet Explorer has only 2 processes.

Waterfox......210472 kb
I-Explorer.....210540 kb

Not much difference!

Is WaterFox really more lightweight or is that just a common belief?

 

[Alejandro85]

Memory usage is not the only way to measure "ligthweightness" (is that even a word ), in fact, it's a very bad indicator on its own. You have to consider a lot more factors to tell which one is ligther.

For example, relying entirely on the screenshot, 2 processes of IE are definitely better than the 4 of Waterfox, but if you look at the CPU time, you can see that while Waterfox has used a few second of CPU, IE consumed it for a whopping minute and a half, which directly drains of resources of other programs, heats the computer more and drains the battery.

Moreover, your measure tests just test an empty browser, which is not the typical use pattern you'll see. Most likely you'll want to measure on a fully working browser, with many tabs opened and doing many things. That's a more realistic day to day use.

But besides all measures you can make, consider that being more "lightweight" is not exactly a 100% technical matter where you just evaluate CPU/memory/disk and the like. It also can be subjetively evaluated by things like how well it reacts to instructions given, how fast it is and things like that. You can't simply measure them with tooling, those are things you can only evaluate by using it and comparing to other similar programs.

Finally, it's worth noting that, besides all evaluations you can make, Internet Explorer is a totally obsolete browser. It has not received an update since 2013 while the web standards evolved considerably since then. Many websites either fail in some way or plain refuse to work with it. There is little to no reason to use it in this day and age.