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...

The Tale of Two Browsers - Battling the Memory Bloat and Performance Loss

I'm a big fan of Gmail - especially when it comes to technical mailing lists and the contextual advertising it provides. I quite regularly use the suggested links for product research.

Up until recently, I'd been using Gmail inside Internet Explorer 7. Around the time of the new Gmail interface, Gmail started getting slower and IE7's memory profile started getting bigger. IE7 also got a lot less stable, so much so that I needed to not only install IE7Pro for session crash protection, but I had to launch a separate IE7 process just for Gmail.

I finally got sick of the instability and slowness, so I thought I'd give Firefox a crack at it. Not only is Gmail more responsive under Firefox, but Firefox is using a lot less memory than the equivalent IE7 process and it doesn't keep growing like IE7 does.

I get the distinct impression that there are quite a few memory leak and garbage collection problems in IE7, which makes it a problem in a Web 2.0 world, or for browser power users. It would be nice to see Microsoft address this problem in current and future releases of their browser.

The added advantage of Firefox is that I can use addons like Better Gmail 2 for a richer, more productive browser experience.

I'm still using IE7 for all my other browsing, so the del.icio.us addons for both browsers come in handy for centralised bookmarks.

Desperately Awaiting Windows Vista SP1 (or why Power Users should use Firefox)

IE7 under Windows Vista (and also under XP) is driving me nuts.

I frequently have 20-30 browser tabs open. These tabs generally contain my reading list and I place them in reading order. I also have a second IE7 window open for general searches and Webmail.

About once a fortnight I have IE7 crash on me. What really sucks is a lack of built-in IE7 crash recovery. For that I use IE7Pro. It does a reasonable job.

Sometimes the crash recovery just doesn't work all that well. When it doesn't work, I use TravelLog to pull out my URL history, then use FileParse (with XP compatability enabled) to reformat the output so I can quickly process the URL history in Excel.

This is obviously time consuming.

The final nail in the coffin for IE7 on Vista for me is that when I have 32+ tabs open I get a Denial of Service on Windows Explorer. Yes, that's right. When I exceed 32 tabs and go to the Start Menu and click on Computer, Explorer opens and then immediately closes. If I reduce the tabs to less than 32 I get Explorer functionality back.

This is a serious regression from Windows XP. Under XP I don't get this DoS. Under XP, it takes about 64 tabs for the interface to screw up, but this only affects IE7. Windows Explorer in XP still remains functional. The obvious indication of exceeding the capabilities in IE7 is that tabs fail to render content and also losing the ability to bring up right-click menus. This also occurs under Vista, but at a tab count of about 32 and with the added bonus of a Windows Explorer DoS.

So I'm now installing Firefox 2.0 and will be using this as my primary browser. This will improve my browsing efficiency and will stop my blood from boiling when IE7 crashes, or Explorer stops loading.

I really, really hope Vista SP1 fixes this.

New Business Web Site

I finally upgraded the single page Melbourne IT-hosted site to a self hosted site for my business.
Because I'm a Microsoft registered partner and have access to the Microsoft Action Pack, I decided to see if I could build my own site using Expression Web. I used one of the corporate templates and was able to quickly build my site with my own content. I had installed Expression Web on my Vista laptop, so my initial design was only viewed using IE7.
I then proceeded to use Virtual PC to load up a Windows XP VM to test IE6 and I downloaded Firefox 2.0, the PortableApps version of Firefox 1.5, Opera 9.22 and Safari for Windows 3.0.3. The site displayed correctly under all these browsers! For someone who's used previous versions of FrontPage, I was fairly impressed to see consistent rendering across all browsers and proper handling of hand coding by the IDE (ie, by leaving it alone!).
It certainly took me less time to get the site up using the template and modifying it than hand coding it from scratch.
My final verification was to run the W3C Validator, the Validome Validator and the WDG Validator over the site. There were a couple of problems, but these were ones that I had introduced into the site. Microsoft's claim of "Built-in support for today's modern Web standards makes it easy to optimize your sites for accessibility and cross-browser compatibility" - while not rigorously tested by my effort - is backed up by the browsing consistency I saw as well as passing the three validators I used.

Microsoft Support Site and Firefox 1.5

When I upgraded from Firefox 1.0.7 to Firefox 1.5rc1, I found that the Microsoft Knowledge Base articles would only display about a screenful of content, then add the footer. A subsequent upgrade to 1.5 final seemed to have resolved it, but now it’s back (. I did get a pleasant surprise yesterday – some pages appeared to have displayed correctly! Further investigation revealed that the MSKB articles that are rendered poorly by Firefox have the format

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;XXXXXX

and the MSKB articles that render correctly have the format

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/XXXXXX

(replace XXXXXX with your favourite MSKB article number)

Now all I need to do is find a URL rewriter extension for Firefox. If I can’t find one, then I might have to write my own.

Thought I’d also try the Blogger for Word addin to see how it goes…