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.