For me, the browser is the primary productivity suite. I use it for everything from email to keeping documents, workflows and many other things. Even to the extent that my browser instances can run for close to a week without being restarted, that is when they don't wind up being sluggish like a drunk mule, which happens way too often for my liking.

I started with Firefox when it was called Phoenix and did not have an installer. I have tried all sorts of browsers, K-Melon, Opera, every version of Internet Explorer till version 7 and many more that did not last for more than a couple of days at the best on my computers. But if there is anything that has been constant with all of them, it is that they have grown progressively worse with every release in terms of resource utilization.

Now, that was not so much of an issue when I moved to a Mac about a year ago. It was a Macbook Pro that sported 2 GB of RAM, which leads you to kind of be pretty okay with the RAM-tastic excesses the browsers tend to indulge in. My development environment, including Apache and the various databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL and CouchDB) and other nicknacks had about a GB to play with, while the browser itself could use 500 MB of RAM and I could not give a damn.

It is a different story altogether that even with 500 GB of RAM, the venerable Firefox would slow down with usage, and even in the stock-install extension-free mode, it would still consume memory much worse than a lifetime AA member knocking back glass after glass at an open bar. I loved my extensions, but seriously, this was getting to be way too much, with or without them. I had to find a new browser and the move to a Macbook with just one GB of RAM made it even more urgent.

I've had Camino, Opera, Safari and Webkit installed on OS X for a long time now and decided to subject all of them to the same test. I opened up the same set of tabs (Gmail, Google Docs, Facebook and 30 other tabs) in all the browsers and worked with them in the same manner for the same period of time. The results were rather interesting.

Opera, Safari and Firefox shot up well over 200 MB of RAM usage in no time with the tabs. At least in Firefox's defence, the usage was that high at least with my extensions still active, while the others had no such issues plaguing them. What was actually interesting was that all three browsers seem to have a major problem letting go of the RAM, once it was done doing whatever it wanted to do with it.

Camino, on the other hand, rarely goes over 200 MB of RAM usage, irrespective of the number of tabs I have kept open, or for how long I have kept it open. There are occasional CPU spikes because of pages that have refreshing elements or pages that refresh itself, otherwise, even CPU remains well under 20.

I have used the browser now for over two weeks now and the only thing I can complain about is that it does not support Google Gears, which is something I can live with. It is not that huge a deal. I have also used both stable and nightly releases and both have performed in predictable and stable ways. What is even better is that I've not had a single crash yet with the browser.

Now, you would wonder why it is such a huge deal to conserve RAM? When you just have one GB of the stuff to play with, it means that you easily get into territory where your system starts swapping out from virtual memory. And once the machine starts swapping regularly, the disks start spinning more. And once the disk starts spinning more, it eats up more power (AC or DC) and you wind up eventually with hotter, slower and more inefficient computers.

Ever since I've switched my browsers, the Macbook has run consistently longer and cooler and that is something I can't complain about. If I were you, I'd stop using the other browsers and switch to Camino.

Camino