Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1's Not Much Better

OK, try the same thing with IE8 Beta 1. This time I only opened 4 tabs, then closed them down.

Task Manager:

 

Same thing with Firefox 2.0, after loading exactly the same pages and closing them in exactly the same order:

Task Manager:

Yeah, I know, not scientific. But I'd like my RAM back. Especially considering it's running on Vista.

As an aside, the time between closing the "empty" IE7 window last night and the iexplore.exe process finally exiting was ~30min. And before anyone asks the Temporary Internet Files folder was not set to be emptied on exit.

Must get another 2GB of RAM for my laptop. Plus a faster hard drive.

Which begs the question - when are we going to start seeing >4GB laptops? And >8GB non-server motherboards? Because it's clear to me that the big software developers of this world are living in fantasy land and are far more concerned about their profits, time to market and the cost of developers (probably in that order too) rather than what the user actually wants.

The memory bloat is everywhere - office apps, PDF viewers, anti-malware, OSes...

I think for all the waiting I've done for bloatware this year I could have spent the time finding the extra 1KB I need for my BBC B to display a decent windowing system :-)

I think I'll just go back to my book. Hey, when did Sci-Fan get so big? 500+ pages, trilogies that run to 10+ books...... <sound of rant fading into the lounge>

I'm reading The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan - up to book 9. I really, really need an upside to something right now...

Internet Explorer 7 - Poor Memory Management

OK, I've had an IE window open for about a week now. I've closed down the 50-odd tabs I had open (would have had another 200-odd tabs open during that time though not concurrently), leaving it with an empty tab:

What does Task Manager think about it?

Hmm... My Firefox 2.0 footprint was smaller than that...

IE8 Beta might be getting an install shortly...