Which browser uses the least RAM in 2026?
Eight browsers, three workloads, one identical test rig. Measured by hand using Windows Task Manager and Activity Monitor — not pulled from a benchmark site.
| Browser | Idle (1 tab) | 10 tabs | 100 tabs | Engine |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brave | 410 MB | 1.81 GB | 4.80 GB | Chromium |
| Firefox | 380 MB | 1.93 GB | 5.09 GB | Gecko |
| Microsoft Edge | 460 MB | 2.07 GB | 5.70 GB | Chromium |
| Vivaldi | 470 MB | 2.16 GB | 5.87 GB | Chromium |
| Arc | 510 MB | 2.32 GB | 6.30 GB | Chromium |
| Google Chrome | 520 MB | 2.39 GB | 6.56 GB | Chromium |
| Opera | 540 MB | 2.45 GB | 6.73 GB | Chromium |
| Safari | 290 MB | 1.46 GB | n/a | WebKit |
The honest answer
If you only have one window with 5-10 tabs open, browser choice barely matters for RAM — every modern browser fits inside roughly 1.5 to 2.5 GB and your machine will not feel the difference unless you are on 8 GB or less.
The differences become real around 30+ tabs, when Chromium-based browsers start spawning many helper processes. That is where Brave, Firefox and Edge (with Sleeping Tabs on) pull ahead by 1-2 GB compared to vanilla Chrome.
If you are on a Mac and have no specific reason to use anything else, Safari uses 30-40% less RAM than any Chromium browser. The trade-off is fewer extensions and slightly worse compatibility with web apps designed for Chrome.
Why "Chrome eats RAM" is partly a myth
Chrome looks like a memory hog in Task Manager because it shows up as 15-20 separate processes (one per tab/extension/iframe origin). Add them up and the total can look alarming — 4 GB across 30 lines. But that is the same memory you'd use in any browser, just split across more rows.
The real Chrome RAM problem is that it does not return memory to the OS as quickly as Firefox does. A tab that used 600 MB at peak might still hold 400 MB an hour later, even if the page is now idle. Chrome 110 added "Memory Saver" to address this — leave it on (Settings → Performance → Memory Saver).
Settings that actually move the needle
- Chrome: enable Memory Saver. Drops inactive tabs to ~40 MB after a few minutes.
- Edge: enable Sleeping Tabs (default). Set the timeout to 5 minutes.
- Firefox: nothing to enable — already aggressive about discarding inactive tabs since v95.
- Brave: already runs Memory Saver-equivalent by default.
- Safari: close tabs older than a week (Settings → Tabs → "Close tabs after one week").
How we tested
Same machine, same network, same time of day, same 10 reference sites for the "10 tabs" workload (Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs with one open document, Notion, Slack web, GitHub, BBC News, Wikipedia, Reddit, X). Same 100-site list (mix of news, social, e-commerce, app dashboards) for the "100 tabs" workload. After loading, we waited two minutes for memory to settle, then recorded the total private working set.
This is one snapshot in time. Memory use varies dramatically by which sites you visit — keeping a Figma file or a YouTube live stream open is more impactful than which browser you chose.
Related
- What laptop am I on? — see your actual RAM
- Is 128GB SSD enough in 2026?
- Laptop running slow? Start here