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...

Wisptis.exe Can Cause Browsing Problems

I went up to serverunleashed.com last week to have a look at Microsoft's marketing efforts for Windows Server 2008 launch.

On my freshly installed Windows Vista Business x64 with SP1 laptop, I was finding that Internet Explorer was locking up before getting to the loader progress bar (the one that appears on Vista and Server 2008 boot up).

I disabled all the add-ons (except Silverlight) to see if one of the add-ons was causing the problem. No go. My XP boxes were displaying it OK, as was my test Server 2003/2008 boxes and another Vista box.

One thing different with my laptop is that it has a Wacom Bamboo tablet. Which means that loads a heap of tablet-specific drivers and helper applications. I would find occasionally that when I launched Internet Explorer it would prompt me to run wisptis.exe, for which I always clicked Allow but never checked "Do not show me the warning for this program again". I thought this might be the problem, because when I force closed IE7 and selected "Look for a solution to this problem and restart Internet Explorer" it would restart IE and prompt to run wisptis.exe.

I went hunting for wisptis.exe and found that it's a pen input device utility that can be installed from a variety of sources, including being bundled with the OS. It's also useful in talking to the tablet digitisers, so removing it or not running it can impact on the usefulness of the tablet device.

Once I checked "Do not show me the warning for this program again" when prompted to run wisptis.exe and clicked Allow, then I was able to successfully view serverunleashed.com.

So if you're having Internet Explorer lock-ups when visiting a site and you've got tablet devices/drivers installed, this could be your problem.

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.

IE7 Crash Protection

After yet another IE7 crash caused by Adobe's Flash Player I decided to have one final look for an IE Add-on that could save tab state in the event of a crash. If I couldn't find one, then IE7 was going to be replaced with Firefox as my primary browser.
Thankfully - and without too much effort - I came across IE7Pro. This usful free add-on provides crash protection as well as a host of other useful features, such as Tabbed Browsing Management, Spell Check, Inline Search, Super Drag Drop, Proxy Switcher, Mouse Gesture, Tab History Browser, Web Accelerator, User Agent Switcher, Webpage Capturer, AD Blocker, Flash Block, and Greasemonkey like User Scripts platform (feature list copied from the afore-mentiond site).
So the combination Flash Block and Crash Recovery should lessen my IE7 frustrations.
Now if I only had a more feature rich tool than TravelLog IE URL History Tool to pull out browser history...