A few years ago, the gaming company Corsair ran an interesting ad. In this ad, a man in a Google Chrome shirt greedily eats a RAM-shaped cookie, while another man in an Adobe Photoshop shirt takes a bite of the cookie and puts the rest back.

This is an indictment of Chrome, even if it lacks significant context. By the way, Google Chrome really does destroy computer memory. But at the same time, it got me thinking: does Chrome really eat up RAM? If so, do other popular Internet browsers take a more conservative approach?

I tested Chrome against Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge, and despite its reputation for being a RAM hog, Chrome's performance was not the worst. In fact, Chrome was about in the middle, Firefox consumed the most RAM overall, and Microsoft Edge consumed the least RAM across all tests.

A quick refresher: Random Access Memory (RAM) is where data is stored for short-term processing. Computers need RAM to render text, images, music, videos, and basically everything else on a website. Therefore, browsers require a lot of RAM, especially the more tabs you have open.

To find out how much RAM each browser requires, I shut down all unnecessary programs on my PC and launched one browser at a time. In that browser, I opened 10 tabs that I might come across in my daily life: Google, Tom's Guide, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube. (Tom's Guide, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, etc. (I also opened Corsair's website.)

I used the Guest profile for Chrome and Edge, and a "clean" profile for Firefox to keep extensions and bookmarks out of the way. From there, I simply monitored memory usage with Windows Task Manager.

The second step was to see how each browser handled large amounts of data. When a browser has a large number of tabs open, instead of trying to run each tab simultaneously, it often prioritizes and optimizes the data to conserve RAM. In this case, we kept the first 10 tabs and added 10 more tabs for equally loaded sites such as eBay, Best Buy, New York Times, Disney Plus, and Google Stadia.

Next, to load each browser, we opened a whopping 60 tabs in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge; from the 20-tab test, we opened three of each website; from the 20-tab test, we opened three of each website. In the last test, each browser was opened twice, each time launching 20 tabs. This replicated the user's multitasking, for example, writing in one window and doing research in another.

Chrome consumed 952 MB of memory to launch 10 tabs, and Firefox consumed 995 MB. But the real surprise was Edge, which consumed only 873 MB of memory; that Edge achieved such a result is not so surprising considering that Microsoft's browser now runs on the same Chromium architecture as Chrome. But beating Google is still impressive.

In a 20-tab test, Chrome was the weakest, consuming 1.8 GB of RAM, compared to 1.6 GB for Firefox and just 1.4 GB for Edge.

With 60 tabs loaded in a single browser window, Chrome and Firefox consumed 3.7GB and 3.9GB of RAM, respectively, while Edge maintained the best performance, consuming 2.9GB of RAM. The results are much clearer than in the 20-tab test, where Firefox required a whole extra gig of memory compared to Edge. On the other hand, not all users need to have 60 tabs open at the same time, so consider whether this use case applies to you.

In the last test, with 40 tabs open in two instances (20 tabs each), Edge required 2.5 GB of RAM overall, while Chrome required 2.8 GB and Firefox 3.0 GB. These numbers are roughly double the numbers required in the 20-tab test, which is not too surprising. However, Chrome seems to be a bit better about optimizing data across two windows.

Microsoft touts Edge as a real contender in the web browsing arena, but my results suggest that the company isn't just blowing smoke up its ass; Edge is leaner and meaner than Chrome and Firefox, and it's also more efficient than Chrome and Firefox. The difference is not something you will see overnight, especially on systems with lots of RAM, but it will be significant for lower-performance PCs, especially lightweight laptops.

It is important to remember that my tests are not highly scientific; RAM usage will vary somewhat from system to system, and will vary greatly depending on what websites you visit and which extensions you use.

Does this make Edge the "best" web browser? Not necessarily. A browser should certainly be lightweight, but it should load your favorite websites without problems, run the extensions you need, and protect users from malware and other malware. We didn't evaluate those factors in this test, so you'll have to decide for yourself if it's worth switching.

However, we did find that Chrome is not as inferior in RAM as we expected and that Microsoft Edge beats both Chrome and Firefox.