OK, so here’s what I just did. I opened TechMeme up, and Ctrl-clicked on every link on the main part of TechMeme. That opened every link up into a tab. Then I went to Windows Task Manager and looked at how much memory each took.

Firefox 2: 249,996 K
IE 7: I couldn’t complete the tasks, but after loading only about half of the links iexplore was taking 295,800K.

Firefox 2 was much faster on my machine to open up all the tabs and get me back surfing. In fact, on my little Lenovo X41 Tablet PC, I couldn’t complete opening all of the links using IE7. IE was just getting slower and slower.

Now, this isn’t matching what other people are seeing. Lifehacker says that IE 7’s memory utilization is much lower than Firefox’s. Which tells me something must be messed up on my machine and/or something else is getting loaded on my IE7 machine.

What are you seeing?