BANGALORE, INDIA: No denying the fact that the frequent and unrelenting upgrades to Google Chrome have indeed lit a fire in the browser supremacy race. The competition is urging to respond back with version upgrades and improvements of their own. This is quite evident by the latest version upgrade to Firefox barely months after the release of Firefox 6.

The schematic changes in Firefox 7 include a new version of hardware-accelerated Canvas for faster HTML5 games and animations, and improvements for Web developers. These include support for the W3C navigation timing API, which allows developers to measure page load time and site navigation against factors like bandwidth, and a new set of developer tools.

Mozilla Firefox 7, however, is trying hard to encash on its memory management capability which is at the heart of the release and should go a long way in increasing adoption levels.

We compared the stable releases of Google Chrome, Opera, IE along with Firefox 7 and 6 to get an insight into the performance as well as the memory management aspect being highlighted by Firefox. We installed these browsers on a Windows 7 , 2GB RAM , Core 2 Duo machine to analyse them.

The performance benchmarking was done through our tried and tested Peacekeeper benchmark available from Futuremark at http://clients.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/index.action. We measured the memory management of the browser by using the task manager to find the memory being consumed by the browser's default page. Subsequently, we added 5 tabs to the browser to see the difference. These tabs were added in the this order: yahoo.com, pcquest.com, ciol.com, snapdeal.com, and youtube.com.

The results as tabulated do validate Firefox 7's claims of being the latest browser with the best memory management amongst all. This fares well for systems which do not have a lot of RAM. People can be rest assured that Firefox 7 would eat up lot less resources, leaving you with room for more multitasking on your existing system. The performance of the browser was a realreal let-off though, as dismal scores were recorded for the browser.

Bottomline: The dismal performance by the latest upgrade is overshadowed by the best-in-class memory management capability. Something new for enthusiasts as well as regular users to play around with.