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IE8 Beta 2 Fatter Than Firefox and XP
snydeq writes "Consuming twice as much RAM as Firefox and saturating the CPU with nearly six times as many execution threads, Microsoft's latest beta release of Internet Explorer 8 is in fact more demanding on your PC than Windows XP itself, research firm Devil Mountain Software found in performance tests. According to the firm, which operates a community-based testing network, IE8 Beta 2 consumed 380MB of RAM and spawned 171 concurrent threads during a multi-tab browsing test of popular Web destinations. InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy speculates that Microsoft may be designing IE8 for the multicore future. But until your machine sports four or eight discrete processing cores, IE8 will remain 'porcine,' Devil Mountain's Craig Barth says."
Its fatter and more bulky, but definitely not faster than Firefox, Opera or Safari.
I'm sticking with Firefox, sirs.
slashdot rocks
I hate being turned into a Microsoft apologist on this one, but give them a break. IE8 is still beta. Comparing release quality software to beta quality software is simply unfair.
First off, I deal a lot with AJAX and I think a lot of people feel my pain when we have to write two different Javascript methods to achieve the same functionality between IE6, IE7 & everybody else. And I don't want to hear anybody saying that IE keeps me employed by creating more work. That's bullshit, all it does is hinder my productivity. But now we have:
The getElementById method is now case-sensitive, and it no longer incorrectly performs searches using the NAME attribute.
My god, you mean it's actually going to behave like--you know--the name implies?!
Sanitize HTML -- Easily remove event properties and script from HTML fragments with window.toStaticHTML.
I am intrigued by this and think that this is a great innovative idea from a developer's perspective.
CSS Compliance
I don't think I would be the first person to say compliance to standards are currently lacking in IE. I'm glad to see them acknowledging this area of improvement!
At least it's a step in the correction direction! And on top of that, they are slowly catching up with Firefox plugins like Firebug or a their profiling tools:
I dream of a future where I have means other than javascript popups to check objects in javascript in IE. Yes, yes, I know they have a script debugger today ... if you have some form of .NET studio installed. Which is just peachy if you run Linux and IE4Linux.
... even if it assumes RAM is cheap and your CPU has over 171 cores to spare.
I am both curious of the new AJAX functionality they promise and fearful that they are simply another venue for security risks (let's all hope their cross-domain & cross-document functionalities are sound).
I do not think all is lost on this browser, however
My work here is dung.
Multi threaded browsing is a plus. One of my pet hates of Firefox is the one-bad-tab-crashes-the-browser problem.
I've not used IE for donkey's years, but one thread per tab strikes me as an excellent idea.
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
It's only a beta! Don't jump to conclusions about memory and CPU usage just yet. Although it certainly is an indicator of the way development is coming along, there are plenty of opportunities for the developers to optimize and trim it down before a general release.
Shouldn't You expect more from your DJ?
Surprise! IT'S A BETA! Not a release candidate, not a final release. Stupid sensationalist headlines.
Only uses
We finally found something that sucks more CPU power than Crysis.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
I'm a fan of divide and conquer techniques for a lot of things - but requiring the resources of a freaking fullscale army to do so kind of defeats the point. The whole technique is supposed to be used to accomplish bigger things with fewer resources intelligently, not to shuffle work around (divide) while ostensibly maintaining a product you intent to dominate the market (conquer).
Sounds like they used recursive subdivision of work into threads designed for more generic work.
Ryan Fenton
The comparison is a bit biased -
>> "By greatly increasing the number of concurrent execution threads, and then spreading them out across multiple, discrete processes (in our case, 6 separate instances of iexplore.exe), "
So, they're comparing a single instance of a multi-tabbed browser to 6 separate instances of a single-tabbed browser. You can account for this by the lack of tabs in IE (a fundamental flaw in today's world), but it's still not a fair comparison.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Ah, it did not take too long before fanbois invaded the discussion.
It is difficult to determine who are more annoying fanbois. Apple's or Opera's?
May be a possible poll suggestion?
I'm sure that it will be on par with other Microsoft products once it's finished.
...still use Lynx.
Combine those two and you would expect performance to suck.
*sigh* Because they didn't want to take the name of the LORD Almighty Opera in vain, obviously.
(psst, everyone else, do you think that'll get the Opera fanboys off our backs for a few minutes so we can get some on-topic discussions going?)
I'm guessing they have full debugging options turned on, unstripped binaries with debug symbols intact that take up way more space, and very conservative compile time options. Let's wait until they actually release it before we judge it.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
From the article:
Well duhhh, it uses multithreading - a thread per tab/window, or actually I believe it uses a threadpool to limit the total amount somewhat. So obviously it will use more execution threads. This can be perfectly fine and is in itself not an indication of any problem.
The memory usage could be more of a problem I'm sure. Javascript performance is probably even more interesting to look at...
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
This seems to be a focus on premature optimization IMO. I understand this issue is important, but isn't making sure it's feature correct first more important? Think about it from Microsoft's perspective, what is more important to the typical end-user? Keyword being "typical" and not "geek" like most of us here.
If it was up to me the focus would be on sandboxing, Javascript performance improvements, privacy, and my favorite - standards compliance. Then when all of that is out the door let's focus on getting it slimmed down. This would be the rational way. The tried and true development way.
I completely misread that title.... I guess I expected it to be some sort of news, not something completely expected.
Not having the rat^H^H^H awesome bar makes it score big.
Well as others have pointed out, it's still in beta.
As such, it'll have debug code in it, which tend to bump up the number of execution threads considerably.
You can try the same thing by running an IE7 beta against the release version and looking at the processes. The beta version is much more of a resource hog. It sounds a bit like someone hasn't considered the full picture in this 'comparison'...
Unless those threads are actually processing anything, they represent basically zero overhead.
Hey Windows Internet Explorer 8, have you called Jenny yet?
LOL
Got 8 cores? Why waste them on video rendering when you can browse the web using IE 8 on Vista?
Fatter than a bloated pig means a lot more than lean and snappy Opera.
The "fatter than XP" metric doesn't make much sense to me though. Since you buy a computer to run applications, not operating systems, shouldn't you expect that most of your resources are going to the applications?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It's the reason for which I won't go for XP on my EEE. I'll install Chrome tomorrow and keep using FX3.
Note: IE8b2 - it's still in beta, so. I'll await for IE8 finale review to be posted on /.
Because everyone already knows that Firefox is a bloated pig, and that Opera is much leaner. Showing that IE is more bloated that Opera isn't saying all that much; most things are more bloated than Opera. To claim that IE is more bloated than even Firefox, however, really takes the cake. When you're not rolling your own runtime envionment and yet you still consume more than Firefox does, that's when you know you've really screwed up.
Note that I say this as a Firefox user.
Things, not just MS, have been getting more porcine as computer capacity has increased. This is just a continuation. All that happens is more things are patched onto old programs, they get relabeled as "new", and they use more memory, hard drive space and cpu power. I doubt it will get better, it would seem that all developers do is look at the increased capacity and speed of machines as lebenstraum. There certainly doesn't seem to be any impetus to make more compact, efficient programs
Microsoft is hoping to have the bloat up to 4X Firefox for the final release.
"Accroding to the firm, which operates a community-based testing network,.."
I guess the editors do not use Firefox to spell check before posting.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
380 MB RAM is a lot, but don't forget about debugging code which may decrease this substantailly.
Why should 171 threads be a problem? Threads are pretty cheap today. Creation is fast and while asleep they use up almost no resources. It's a good sign that MS may be able to utilize current and future multicore CPUs.
Ok, thread pools and runnable objects might have been better style. 171 threads indicate that software engineering could not agree on a single Grand Central and every team is allowed to spawn as many threads as they want. But hey, threads are cheap - stil way better than Firefox' single process model.
Which will be interesting when you count in Vista then?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I know what it is! This new version of IE has TWO idle threads.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
My heart stopped for a moment as I thought i'd read 'faster'...
Yes you would. That is why if IE8 takes up *more* resources than the underlying OS, it would be "fatter than XP".
Though, I must say - what's that nonsense about threads and multicores? If your code is inefficient, then with threads and multicores, it just means you are inefficient faster. You can have hundreds of threads that are superefficient, like say, BeOS.
I also misread the summary...
Consuming twice as much RAM as Firefox and saturating the CPU with nearly six times as many execution threads, Microsoft's lamest beta...
and found it quite insightful :P
This is a BETA. There are all kinds of things turned on that will be turned off in the final version. Make your RAM measurements once the final version comes out. And the number of threads doesn't mean anything, since most of them are asleep at any given time.
Microsoft's stuff is MEANT TO BE SLOW AND RESOURCES DEMANDING. Nothing new here. Besides, makes me happy to see they keep making SLOW SOFTWARE. Just proves me why I should stick to OpenSource apps. Vista is slow, IE is slow, everything from Microsoft are slow applications. Linux stuff is lean. Ubuntu + Firefox + Compiz = very lean compared to Vista + IE.
Since you buy a computer to run applications, not operating systems, shouldn't you expect that most of your resources are going to the applications?
Yes, but hopefully not a single application.
-- Remember, we're not happy until you're not happy. -- Local FAA Inspector --
Internet Explorer 8 is in fact more demanding on your PC than Windows XP itself
Uh, shouldn't it be? The whole point of an OS is to be a platform for applications which do the actual final work for the end user. I would hope the browser would use more CPU and RAM than the OS core processes, otherwise that would be an incredibly inefficient OS.
Developers: We can use your help.
To be fair, I completely misread the headline. I thought it said "faster" instead of "fatter".
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Honestly are we surprised with all the resources it is using? We already can expect/assume that each consecutive newer version will take additional resources. Since it is still in beta, I am going to assume it will be much more lean once it is officially released. While in beta, MS usually does not place a large emphasis on its optimization and wishes for the general public to start providing feedback on its functionality.
Just my 2 cents.
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
I'd much rather have 200 mostly-idle threads than 1 core-burning monster. The real news here is that MSIE will probably run better on modern CPUs. I'm kind of glad in a way to see Firefox getting some real competition and incentive for improvement.
Posted via Konqueror. I don't have a dog in this hunt, although I'd be much happier with Firefox dominance than with IE.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
for Microshaft, its "budee budee budee, That's all Folks!"
My fault--I misread the headline. By one letter. Thought it said "faster", not "fatter".
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Microsoft would use firefox as their browser, and contribute back to the community so they could focus on making their other products more secure, usable, and flexible.
I could have sworn that yesterday there was a link to a comic book on this very site that was extoling the VIRTUES of having a browser that uses many processes (which are the heavy hitters, threads are cheap) with a logical minimum of 1 thread per process. Oh, right, M$ == automatically teh wrong, I forgot, forgive me.
Software grows, hardware grows, weeds grow. These things are inevitable, get over them. Don't believe me? Compare the memory footprint of firefox to that of IE4. Oh, features you say? Guess what, that's growth.
Signed,
A future Chrome user temporarily stuck advocating Opera
Paralell code is almost always superior to a single-threaded solution. The memory footprint is inexcusable but the number of threads is impressive, not damning.
Vista's performance is "porcine" enough by itself, but combined with the new and "improved" IE, you will start thinking about yourself as a swineherd
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Ah, it did not take too long before fanbois invaded the discussion. It is difficult to determine who are more annoying fanbois. Apple's or Opera's? May be a possible poll suggestion?
I think that the current poll is "Which Fanboys Make You Cringe the Most?"
As for IE8, I guess somebody saw all the bitching people do about how Firefox is a resource hog and decided, "I'll give 'em something to cry about."
I write sci-fi for metalheads
"y'know, if you compiled that from source like Gentoo does, it would be a lot faster..."
Gentoo's worthless and weak. You should have compiled it on Source Mage. :)
I write sci-fi for metalheads
as i just downloaded ie8 this morning, and slashdot was the first page i navigated to (partly to see if the rendering artifacts of slashdot in ie7 were still an issue). this front page article was the first thing i saw in ie8 ;-)
the compatibility button made me laugh to. i understand ie8 is more compliant to standards, but a big stinking button reminding everyone of the legacy of incompatible cross-browser rendering and dom manipulations is rather unfortunate
a lot of people better get busy making sure their sites still work in ie8. there's a lot who will never hit that button to bring up legacy mode if your site doesn't work, they'll just go away
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Got Firefox at 250mb for two tabs (/. and Reuters), an additional note would be that Photoshop, or anything that requires any significant amount of processing power, hates Firefox.
You don't indicate the Firefox version you are using.
One of the primary things that Firefox 3 delivered was _significant_ CPU and memory reductions.
Comparing to old versions isn't that relevant.
I launched Safari and did fairly heavy browsing for about half an hour- my history shows 66 pages from 22 sites, but now I've got all the tabs closed again except for this one, and Safari's still using 300.8 MB of RAM and 1.25 GB of VRAM. So does Safari suck too, or does IE8 not relatively suck all that much?
It's hovering around 10% usage of one of my two 2 ghz CPU cores, though, so it's not using much processing power.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
I think you'll find Google Chrome will have the same problem. It creates a new entire browser PROCESS for each tab. What could be more bloaty than that? That will mean LOTS more RAM. Stop worrying and just buy more RAM - it's dirt cheap and the Google Chrome model of creating a new process for each new site will mean we have a much more stable browser. Google Chrome and IE8 are designed for modern multi-core systems with plenty of RAM - not for running on your 7 year old Pentium 3. Deal with it. They're not forcing you to upgrade, so if you don't have lots of RAM, stick with a memory efficient browser such IE6 and avoid memory hog browsers like Firefox and IE7-8.
I never get why people are so worried when apps USE their RAM. That's what it's for. As long as it's not due to leak (ie ram usage after a point, remains constant rather than growing infinitely) then I don't get the problem.
I definitely misread the headline as "IE8 Beta 2 Better Than Firefox and XP." For a second I'd thought the reduced sunspot activity had caused hell to freeze over, but...good to know all is still right with the world.
-- Joren
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/#
I wonder how Chrome will compare resource wise. Its a 1 PROCESS per Tab model.
Think Deeply.
PHATTER. You know.... IE8 is Phatter than Firefox and XP. Yeah, it's weigh mor fly. word (2007)
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Perhaps Microsoft should consider giving their developers sub-1GHZ pentium II systems with S3 video, 512MB of RAM and 80GB hard drives. Perhaps then there'd be some incentive to write lean software that runs quickly (or at all) on that setup.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
except that maintaining all that per-thread state takes additional kernel memory, and context switching thrashes cpu. i'd say that 171 threads is excessive for 2 of even 4 core cpu.
As an Opera user, a fresh install of firefox without extensions actually isn't that bad, and I'm having real stability problems with Opera at the moment (Arch Linux x64).
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
I keep my Firefox updated, and I've noticed some CPU and memory reduction. I appreciate this. But when you're starting out at what FF2 had, you can have significant -even major- reduction while still being a bloated pig, and even with the improvements FF3 still has yet to completely escape from that trap.
I could make a program that will spawn 300 pointless threads if you want. Doesn't make it impressive at all.
Parallel code that works faster is superior to a single thread solution sure, but unless your threads really are usefully independent then you will just make the whole thing less efficient due to the extra overhead. What possible need is there for 171 threads in a web browser unless it has like 50 tabs open?
which is totally what she said
Apps using RAM is not what is of concern, but the trend of using the copious amount of RAM in the system inefficiently is. Just because it's there doesn't mean you have to use it. Stability is not a function of how many threads you spin or how much RAM you use.
There is something still to be said for efficient, tight code that runs fast and doesn't suck up all of your system resources. Too bad the IE group can't bring themselves to say it.
Nonsense. 'Accroding' is a perfectly cromulent word. It is the gerund of the verb 'to accrode', which is the process by which an entity corrodes via accretion of a substrate.
Now, I think the author's usage is terrible, but that word should get through the strictest of spell-checkers.
The more you know...
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
It's designed by Microsoft to answer user complaints of "System Idle Processes" using up so much CPU. This can almost guarantee to lower the resource hog that is "System Idle Processes".
The Internet is generally stupid
Software bloat continues to fester. It never ceases to amaze me how video games, although looking better, are now shorter and take up more resources than ever. And now we have to worry even more about our web browsers? Does anyone remember 10 years ago? Browsers were small, and that's the way we liked them! When will software companies get the hint: Bigger is not always better.
No portion of this post may be rebroadcast without the express, written consent of Major League Baseball.
I have done quite of bit of desktop and server programming in my time on the Microsoft development stack. I cannot imagine *ever* needing 171 threads unless you are writing a server application. Seriously, what the hell are the developers are Microsoft doing? Even in beta! There should be some better programming practices in place from day one.
I went to a conference a few years ago where threading guru Jeffrey Richter basically ripped Microsoft developers for being bad at thread management. He brought up Outlook on his demo machine, and showed 50-some threads running (if memory serves). Over 50 threads to, umm, check email.
I would think that even a year one developer would remember concepts like thrashing and memory management from their computer science classes.
Debugging multi-threaded code is tough. I cannot imagine the task MS will have if they wish to refactor some of these threads out of the product (which they should).
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Whether or not parallel code is superior to a single-threaded solution depends on the application and the actual implementation. In some cases there's no way to actually make a multi-threaded version of the same application any faster, the best you can hope for is the same level of performance. In other cases the assumptions made when deciding what parts of the application should be in separate threads turn out to be incorrect.
Multi-core is working because most people now run multiple applications at a time, not because more applications take advantage of multi-threading properly (not to mention that the OS itself is using CPU time in addition to any applications you are using). Going from 2 to 4 cores has proven less beneficial for most users simply because people so rarely use the CPU resources they have, and the problems of getting more benefit in a single application from 4 cores are even more complicated than 2, except in specific applications.
Browsers, especially in a world of multi-tab browsers with higher use of flash and javascript on the web, should be able to benefit from multi-threading, but how much benefit can be gained and whether or not the initial assumptions programmers make going into the project are correct are the main questions at hand.
Of course, 171 threads makes you wonder what assumptions they were making, or even what they're doing with those threads.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
ff3 generally uses quite a bit less memory than opera9.5.
Google finds many benchmarks, but to pick one: http://avencius.nl/content/firefox-3-vs-opera-95-memory-usage-take-2
...Internet Explorer 8 is in fact more demanding on your PC than Windows XP itself.
Maybe they missed the day in CS101 when we learned that the OS SHOULD use fewer resources so that programs working directly for the user have more RAM and CPU available. (And, yes, I know some consider XP a pig too, but I think Visa has proven that XP is pretty lean and mean by comparison.) As long as I don't have to upgrade until my hardware can handle it, I'm all for ultra-fast web browsing. After all, the web browser is probably the program I spend the most time with (and not just because it's slow).
I guess nobody here has yet figured out what "beta" means.
OMG!!! Call the press!!! A beta build is oversized, and... gasp!!!... has some bugs too!!!
It's easy to understand the mistake, however- Slashdot is filled with people who only beta quality software which will never be ready for prime time. It's free for a reason...
Different development groups, different definitions of the term "beta". FF3 might have been closer to being a clean product before it shipped than IE 8 in beta. The proof will be in what is more popular. I think MS is going to continue to loss market share, but I also think it likely that IE 8 will "not suck". Not the nicest choice but good enough that grandma/corporate doesn't go looking for another browser.
... turn the browser into the OS.
The fact that the article points it out as a surprise that IE8 takes more resources than the OS itself is in itself surprising... Shouldn't the OS always take up less resources than the applications running on top of it?
Twinstiq, game news
I cannot understand how you can make your firefox consume as much RAM. Here I can get more than one hundred tabs open, and even then the firefox use of RAM is below 150 MB
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
I could make a program that will spawn 300 pointless threads if you want.
Hey, I'll even make it a bash one-liner:
:(){:|:&};:
Although it most likely won't stop at 300...
(Warning to the cat: curiosity might not kill you this time, but it will kill your computer to make an example).
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Is it processes or threads? I've heard lots of people say threads but nobody has mentioned distinct independent processes per tab.. I find that a little hard to believe..
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
One of the whole points behind threading is that there isn't any state to maintain. Same with the context switches. You seem to be thinking of multiprocessing, for which your comments are true, not multithreading.
On version 8 of any software, this is alarming. Considering that IE8 is not rewriten from scrach, they will have to work hard to convince.
No they won't. They'll do it just like they got versions 4, 5, 6, and 7 out there: bundling and forced upgrades.
Fortunately, there are portable Opera and portable Firefox... at least until some "security" "upgrade" blocks them permanently or something.
MSIE is one of the ongoing embarrassments for MSFTers. If quality were an issue, it would make since to send MSIE to the bit bucket and skin Opera or FF, but lock-in trumps function so it won't happen.
I guess a small, good effect is that to get rid of MSIE, you do have to leave Windows behind completely.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
(only slightly tongue-in-cheek)
Wasn't the MS argument in the anti-trust case that it was impossible to NOT bundle the browser with XP because it was inextricably tied to the Operating System? I seem to remember the "solution" was to make displaying the IE shortcut on the desktop optional for OEMs who wanted to provide Netscape as the default browser. Therefore, if IE5=XP then IE8 should be expected to be > XP?
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Hey, is Microsoft trying to steal a march on Google Chrome and its multiple independent processes? Hey, if Google can do this we can do it twice as well - just count our threads!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
the number of threads is impressive, not damning.
What's really impressive is using so many threads to do so very little — and to do it more efficiently.
(Oh, and "parallel" is spelled... like that. I'm not necessarily making a big deal of it, but the Grammar Nazi within just couldn't let it pass.)
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Many problems don't benefit from parallelism.
"The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned." - Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man Month
Last time I checked, Firefox was pretty fast. I'd like to see the day when Microsoft releases a browser that's faster than FF... but I won't be holding my breath.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Paralell (sic) code is almost always superior... ...but the number of threads is impressive
Nothing impressive about it. Just because you detect a gaggle of threads doesn't prove the program is a collection of brilliant concurrent algorithms. Spawning an excessive number of threads is a common symptom of poorly written code. In practice I more often see threaded code being used to produce half-baked asynchronous IO systems often on platforms that already provide excellent IO multiplexing APIs.
You can't evaluate use of threads in IE8 from the limited empirical evidence provided here. You may compare it to the behavior of existing successful designs. With IE8 you end up asking "why so many freaking threads?" The answer is probably naive reimplementations of fork() to achieve asynchronous IO or privilege isolation.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
I guess they were counting threads and RAM usage.
Lots of threads/RAM is Ok so long as you get something in return.
But... IE8 doesn't seem to spectacularly better than Firefox with it's 14 (at the moment) threads, so therefore it's bloated.
It's what we scientists call "measuring things".
No sig today...
"The getElementById method is now case-sensitive, and it no longer incorrectly performs searches using te NAME attribute."
From the sound of it you get the idea that case sensitivity is a good thing. It's not! Case sensitivity is the cause of many hard to find bugs. Having two identifiers having the same spelling but differing in case is just asking for trouble. I'm talking in general, this probably is not the case (no pun intended) here. Case sensitivity is a hold over from assembler times, there is no reason why modern languages should be case sensitive. There could be a compiler option for case sensitivity for backwards compatibility but we should abandon it.
More like.. as long as your CPU has 171 cores, apparently.
The windows thread switching code is not supposed to handle that many threads!! Performance tends to decrease drastically at that point... ugh.
This is a beta release though. They still have to optimise the code, & include all of those security vulnerabilities and break standards complaince, or whatever it is they have to do.
Optimizing for multicore is accepting the reality which is the single core not getting much faster anymore.
Which means that useless bloat can't be added anymore -> no more MS software upgrades.
You realize that, for people who went to USian public schools and don't know how to read for context, that FF could mean either Firefox or Final Fantasy, right?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
When I first read the title I thought it said faSter. That would've been news. But FaTter? That is expected from MS.
Firefox is a bloated pig. Why not compare it to Opera?
Kind of the point , isn't it . Firefox has the record for fattest browser . IE8 is going to beat that.
Comparing it to Opera would make it look a lot worse.
Slipping shoelaces ?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What possible need is there for 171 threads in a web browser unless it has like 50 tabs open?
Each tab may have as many as 50 items on it. The HTML webpage calls 10 Javascript files, 5 CSS files, and another 35 images. That's rather common, and rendering each one could very well be another process.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Not only that, but I'd like to point out that process isolation comes at a cost.
This is a much bigger issue on Windows than on Linux, because Windows processes are much more heavyweight. Try a program that recursively calls itself via system(). 100 calls of the program on Windows take about 7 seconds (!) IIRC, while on Linux 10000 calls take 5 seconds on the same machine. I'll do a more rigorous benchmark later because I think this issue will keep resurfacing. However, I don't know whether this is due to an incredibly slow system() implementation on Windows or process creation overhead. Note: on Linux the shell forks to execute the new program, so you actually have twice the amount of new processes created.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
I don't need that . I've got BOINC for that.
Slipping shoelaces ?
Since you buy a computer to run applications, not operating systems, shouldn't you expect that most of your resources are going to the applications?
It seems like people are now getting used to the idea that every new computer needs 4GB RAM, so to starve off Moore's law for the benefit of the hardware manufacturers, MS makes sure that people will now need 8GB of RAM. And faster processors, and more disk space, ad nauseum.
What does MS get from the hardware manufacturers in return? Have you tried to use a broadcom chipset, or a webcam, or anything else relatively new with Linux? Now you know why they don't work.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Of course there are switches for threads, because they have their own stack and register contents etc.
Of course, if those threads are idle waiting for windows messages, they won't even be switched into unless a message arrives for them to deal with.
Why so many characters? Put this in a script, mark it executable and have at it:
$0&$0
Program Intellivision!
I guess you missed the memo? If that article's to be believed, Firefox 3's memory usage is around 50% - 75% of Opera 9.5's. Or am I misreading the graphs?
Program Intellivision!
What exactly is offtopic in my post? I smell fan boy moderation.
Intelligence shared is intelligence squared.
You didn't mention, but I'm pretty sure from those definitions it isn't software development...
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
I just installed it and it works great. Memory usage never topped 100mb and it's very fast so far. Devil Mountain is a bunch of morons with an agenda. This isn't the first bit of nonsense they've come up with.
Why the Mozilla tag? Does everything that has to do with web browsers have to be grouped with Firefox?
Fuck you if you can't take a joke.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
You are correct, and my simplification was a bit much. But I'm sure you realise that the switch is very lightweight compared to a full process switch, simply due to the large amount of state information, mapped address space, etc. etc. This is particularly true on Windows, where a process context switch takes orders of magnitude longer - their own documentation refers to "cheap" threads and "expensive" processes.
As an aside, this is one reason why MS has pushed multithreading so hard as a design pattern. The Unix tradition is of course multiprocessing, and Linux was designed with very fast context switching as a priority. Linus's antipathy towards threads has its roots in this distinction.
In theory, Chrome should run very well on Unix and Unix-like operating systems, and maybe less so on Windows.
"Browsers don't need to be integrated with online apps," said marketing developer Ian Moulster. "Certainly not like the operating system ... I'll just get back to you."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Of course it sucks. I'm using it right now and it's so worthless that I have to use the Emulate IE7 functionality to get anything done. The point of a beta is to get it out there so that people can test it. If they didn't put it out there I'm sure there would be a bunch of articles whining about how Microsoft is being too secretive in their development and not letting the community participate in the process. I wonder of the tool who wrote the article that we are commenting about is going to write a follow up article when the final release comes out and runs just fine under XP on P4 2.8 with 512MB of RAM.
There certainly doesn't seem to be any impetus to make more compact, efficient programs.
Especially not within MS as concerns IE RAM useage, considering that:
As far as other software companies are concerned, I think you have two camps. One camp is large (includes Microsoft), and sides with hardware vendors, and has deep ties with these vendors, and they tend to press "Use all the resources you can". Then you have the traditional, "Optimal is always better" camp, which is much smaller and usually focused on creating programs that will run across all hardware-old and new. Most of these companies don't have deep ties with hardware vendors- and I think the ties with the hardware vendors are mostly to blame for bloatware/pork-ware.
There are of course, exceptions.
Microsoft software large, bloated and slow. Film at 11.
(Night is still dark, water is still wet: this story has been true since about October of 1989.)
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Sorry, I wasn't aiming for efficiency :)
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
I can understand the performance gains that can be had by having roughly as many threads as CPU cores but spawning one for each page is going to eat resources like nothing before. Crashing plugins and rendering engines isnt going to be solved by letting that perticular thread die. It would be better if they solved the bugs from where they came, bandaid solutions is so Microsoft.
HTTP/1.1 400
Firefox says "accroding" is spelled wrong. It says "cromulent" is spelled wrong, too... at least it knows "gerund"!
On further investigation, neither "accroding" nor "cromulent" are on merriam-webster.com...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
in the timeframe of the designs of the various versions of IE and the projections of the chip makers.
Last time I looked at a Dell catalog, multi-core was almost the only thing available and real memories were 4 to 8 times what XP on the desktop wanted.
4 years ago I had to set the design goals of something that would run on an Intel processor in about 2 years..making that 2 years ago. I said then I didn't care if it ever ran on a single processor system, you can assume multi-core and big real memory were cheap.
I surmise MS doesn't plan this browser so much as an upgrade to existing systems but as something to make Vista and bundled systems more attractive to their OEMs which is where they get their $$$$
They and their OEMs could care less about the XP 2Ghz 512MB system you have now...except as they add functionality you'll want to pay that OEM and the OEM pays MS. After all, how old is that system? And what would the upgrade cost be...$3-400? And what piece of that would MS get?
And if the business world wants standards, if the Linux influence is starting to make standards compliance a required check off item when setting the corporate standard...all the more to target the current and future hardware.
Animated ads. Oh, and popups. Remember, this IS Internet Explorer.
I got to upgrade my hardware agian????
Joe Investor
Microsoft writes some crap, bloated POS - and all the Microsoft shills come out of the woodwork to say, "Well, it's just beta, so you can't judge the final product."
The same arguments were used when Vista was in beta - and Vista proved to be just that, a bloated dog that half the industry wants to forget exists.
Stuff a sock in it. IE8 is going to be a bloated POS just like every other Microsoft product.
Microsoft does not sell software - it sells lies.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
double whoosh
I'm sorry, it didn't crash any of my computers. I use:
OSX
OpenBSD
See, some operating systems understand the idea of sane limits versus unlimited access.
Well lets see if we can figure it out:
1 for each key on the keyboard, that's 104
A mouse with 1 laser, 2 buttons and a wheel, that's 4 more
50 for each tab you might open
And 23 "backups" in case something happens to one of the other threads
heise.de tested IE7, IE8 Beta2, FF3.0.1, FF3.01 with Java+Flash and 12 recommend addons, Opera9.52, Safari3.1.2, Safari4 Developer Preview
That I HAVE to use IE7/WMP10 to view Netflix Online Instant View content, I am assuming it is simply because of DRM that was imbedded in IE8 to serve said DRM to people that refuse to let the DRM that is Vista on their machines. My guess is that the bloat is just the DRM.
Microsoft wants that DRM on everyones machines at all costs. Vista failed to do it, so now they are trying with their browser, something that most XP users will upgrade to.
I for one, ONLY use IE7(combined with WMP10) to watch Netflix, nothing more. But even in that sense, they got me by the balls. If I do not cave, no Instant View Netflix for me. When they make me switch to IE8 in order to view, my Netflix viewing will cease.
Hear me, Netflix?
They used webkit and built it from the ground up.
Hey, I built my own car from the ground up.
I used a brand new Toyota and one of those 8-ball shifter knobs from Pep Boys - I sure am a great mechanic!
Does this really surprise anyone?
Fatter than a bloated pig means a lot more than a lean and snappy Oprah.
There. Fixed that for you.
F'ing LOL.. That made my day.
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
...but i bet that my spyware will run lightining-fast now with all those extra threads to utilize!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
"Because everyone already knows that Firefox is a bloated pig, and that Opera is much leaner."
That's just plain old misinformation. Firefox 3 is on par with Opera in terms of memory usage, and is much faster at loading pages than Opera.
In my own testing Firefox 3 was O(1) (a small constant amount) behind Opera in memory usage. It was a tiny amount and it remained pretty much the same. Basically Opera doesn't have a significant memory performance lead now, but rather, only a token lead. Considering how much more useful Firefox 3 is, when used with extensions, than Opera, Firefox 3 wins hands down.
That's true for at least the current round. Further bouts are expected and I cannot predict the results. But if things go as planned, Firefox will kick Opera's ass one more time in the next round as well.
Google's chrome got some very mixed first impressions too. So far we've seen mostly hype from Google. There is a real paucity of useful and reliable information about Google Chrome as of yet.
It was a resource hog and the longer you kept using it, consumed more and more resourses.
What did they call it?
A FEATURE, but when IE does it, BLA, BLA, BLA.
Would anybody need a browser like that?
I'd rather use Firefox or Lynx ftp://lynx.isc.org/current/
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Maybe I'm giving Microsoft developers too much credit, but having developed almost all of the Windows APIs themselves, as a whole they should generally know how to use them as well. Windows doesn't have anything nearly as elegant as kqueue, but even IOCP works well enough that you wouldn't be throwing in more threads instead.
That said, I can't find a sane reason that you'd need so many threads just for a browser. For pure CPU-bound throughput you're best off having the same number of threads as cores, which gives you minimal overhead with as much parallelism as you'll get out of the hardware. You can add IO-bound threads on top specifically to get that bottleneck out of the way of CPU bound threads. I highly doubt IE8 has 113 IO-bound threads on top of its 4 (or whatever) CPU-bound threads.
Sam ty sig.
2cores to run windows vista...
1 core to run all the other useless crap that comes with vista(gagdets etc)
1 core to run IE
and that leaves the other 4 cores to make a game run decent on vista...
MS taking us 1 step into the future by going 108 steps backwards...
I'm not a big fan of Opera, but I agree, strip down Firefox of everything but ABP, and you'll get a bump in performance.
Another fun thing I did was grab a svn of Swiftfox and had only the Flash10 beta running on it on Ubuntu 8.04 (x64). It's fairly stable (as in hasn't ever given me any trouble!), and a little lighter than Firefox. I'm not familiar with the details as to what makes it lighter weight, but I like it's snappy icon.
The biggest gains I've gotten is from just throwing up a local copy of Squid and disabling Firefox's disk caching. I am uncertain as to why, but FF has always bogged down my boxes when it writes anything to disk. Squid doesn't seem to have this problem.
Proportionally, Vista is no more "bloated" than earlier versions of Windows
Sure, but earlier versions of Windows offered something in exchange for that bloat.
db
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
9.5 was a big stability downgrade.
This space intentionally left blank
We're all talking out of our asses here, but a) This is a beta, so there is probably a ton of debugging code in there increasing the memory footprint, and b) this is a beta, so there could be some sort of debugging framework attached to the process, spawning threads to monitor other threads. Or, c) this is a beta, and there is a bad call to fork() some place.
I really wish people wouldn't criticise a freaking BETA for performance... save that for the RCs. You, I, and every programmer here knows that optimization comes last. Of course, this is Slashdot so what can I expect? *sigh*
Jeremy
these comments have no relevance.. inevitably Chrome will smash it all soon
Firefox 3 runs terribly across two of my Windows XP machines - I've had it consume more than 500MB of RAM with one tab open (course I had just closed some tabs that were open) - apparently it doesn't release memory so well after you close a tab? Anyways, I've moved away from using FF and back to Internet Explorer...
Have you ever heard about autocad?
store passwords in plaintext like Safari?
This is typical performance for another "product from India".
I did not read through the entire thread of posts. When I use the google search bar in IE8, IE crashes out. As I have only started using Chrome today I can't indicate it's the worlds greatest or best, but so far it's better then the new IE.
You might have something there. I think I've seen several MS talks on channel 9 where the guys say that they are adding feature X to the release because beta testers have requested it. Seems like beta release might equal "will this sell". Good thing bad thing, customer gets feature before they normally would have but at the expense of less vetted apps.
You, I, and every programmer here knows that optimization comes last. Of course, this is Slashdot so what can I expect?
On Slashdot, elimination of redundant threads also comes last? :)
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Fanbios Poll is here: http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl
"If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominoes should fall like a house of cards. Checkmate." - Zapp Brannigan
In my own testing Firefox 3 was O(1) (a small constant amount) behind Opera in memory usage.
An interesting use of that expression, given that Big O notation usually refers to the complexity of an algorithm. O(f(n)) already takes into account constant additions of execution time or memory (which seems to be what you're talking about), longer execution time (or more memory) for small values of n, and constant/linear scaling factors of complexity.
Making assumptions about what particular n you're referring to (let's say, number of tabs), and the value of the function (memory usage), I presume that you mean both programs have a fairly constant memory usage regardless of the complexity of use, with one program having a slightly smaller memory footprint.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Unlike Darwin I don't believe NT integrated any code from Mach in its past. It may may share some of the same goals but I don't think it would be fair to say it's based on it...
Given that a lot of subsystems on NT run in the same address space I doubt its that part of its design that makes process spawning slower than thread spawning.
I don't think that it makes a lot of sense to expect some drastic drop in the number of threads in the final release of IE8. Threaded programs usually have their logic distributed across said threads, that is to say, you can't just turn a knob this way or that and change how many concurrent threads are running. Sure some of them likely do the same thing, and could run in succession instead (element renderers? I'm just guessing), but I'm betting my horse and a saddle that what we see is what we'll get. It was a design choice.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
FFX2 was a pig, FFX3 is much better, in fact it uses less RAM than IE6, IE7, and Safari.
Cookies taste good at any point in the baking process from before-baking to almost-burnt.