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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."
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.
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."
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.
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!
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
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.
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
You make a lot of good points. I think I'm pretty fair to MS; I bash them when I think they deserve it, I praise them when I think they deserve it.
Frankly, I've stayed away from a lot of "fancy" javascript just to avoid having duplicate code; and I've also abandoned some pretty cool CSS just to avoid IE problems (although they may be compliant, I actually think in some cases MSs implementation of CSS was better than the standard, especially their box model... there's more but I don't want to get into it.
In this case, not only do we have to allow that this is a beta, but I think we need to point out that most people will not be browsing with a bunch of tabs. I know I do, and I'm sure a lot of slashdotter's do, but I also think we're the exception and most of us probably have more than capable machines to handle it.
That's not an excuse... the requirements should go down, I agree... but on the other hand, the browser IS becoming the platform, so you have to expect it to increase in requirements.
I'm happy for IE8; I hope it becomes widely adopted... and I think competition is good, but if IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome... if they can all just act the same compliant way, I'll be happy guy. I certainly won't berate MS for it.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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 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
Beta is expected to have bugs, but it should be feature and configuration complete. This would mean that unless there are some serious show-stoppers found during beta testing, the Beta version is pretty much what you can expect from the release version.
Alpha, on the other hand, is still considered to be a work in development.
With all that said, Microsoft is well aware of its bloated nature of its software. It sees no reason to change that in the slightest still depending on Moore's law and the ever-increasing capacity of PCs. 640K really SHOULD be enough for anyone. A surprising amount of processing code could be made to fit in that "tiny" space. But then again, I come from a time when code was supposed to be as tiny as humanly possible and C code was simply too wasteful and slow -- Assembler was the language to write in when you wanted small and fast. And write in assembly language I did. It really wasn't all that hard, but it wasn't nearly as visual as today's programming environments either -- you had to imagine boxes and buffers and index registers while writing code. All math was integer math unless you were a PARTICULARLY good coder or had some really nice libraries. Those were actually some pretty good days. It's really sad to see gigabyes of RAM being required to do some fairly simple things.
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?