Chrome used 10 times more RAM than Safari on macOS Big Sur in a recent test

In normal, light browsing, Google Chrome uses 10 times more RAM than Safari on macOS Big Sur, according to a test conducted by Flotato creator Morten Just (via I more)

In a blog post, Just describes that he tested both browsers in two scenarios on the latest version of macOS. The first test was conducted on a virtual machine and the second on a 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro with 32 GB of RAM. In the first round of testing, Just simulated a typical navigation pattern of opening Twitter, scrolling and opening a new tab with Gmail and writing an email.

In that test, Just found that Chrome reached 1 GB of RAM usage, while Safari used only 80 MB of RAM. The two-tab test was just the beginning.

With 54 tabs open, I just found out that Google Chrome uses 24x more RAM per tab compared to Safari. Both browsers, according to Just, were free of any extensions, and this specific test was conducted on your real MacBook Pro, not on a virtual machine. According to their findings, Chrome used 290 MB of RAM per open guide, while Safari used only 12 MB of RAM per open guide.

While the results are surprising, Just says Google Chrome is probably “going out of its way to manage cross-tab memory usage” in an effort to keep the current tab “fast and responsive.” In his tests, Just discovers that his own application, Flotato, a lightweight alternative to Chrome that creates applications based on web pages, used significantly less RAM than Safari and Chrome.

Chrome is known to be a memory hog on Mac and Windows computers, a problem that Google recently tried to solve.

With ‌macOS Big Sur‌, Safari received significant updates that made it go even further than Chrome. Apple says Safari on ‌macOS Big Sur‌ is “50% faster, on average, for loading frequently visited sites than Chrome”, and that Safari provides up to an hour and a half more streaming video and normal web browsing up to an hour longer on a single charge, compared to Chrome and Firefox.