I decided to do a little test on one of my machines with the three browsers I use most. In each browser I opened up Gmail, Google Reader and CNNMoney.

I did this on Friday and did not look at the memory usage until Monday. After a little less than 3 days, we get the following numbers

Chromium 1.0.154.48

180,157k

IE 8.00.6001.18372

362,223k

Firefox 3.0.4

100,148k

Looking at these numbers makes you think that Google wrote Gmail and Google Reader in such a way that it on purpose made Internet Explorer leak memory like a bucket without a bottom.

If IE 
   then leak memory 
else 
   behave normally

I don’t know but this is just crazy, don’t come to me either saying that IE8 is beta, so what, this is insane! IE8 uses 362MB while FireFox 3 only uses 100MB. Chrome compared to Firefox uses almost double the memory. Chrome + FireFox combine still use 80MB less than Internet Explorer 8

Below is a screen shot of what memory usage looks like