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IE8 Beta 2 Fatter Than Firefox and XP 597

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."
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IE8 Beta 2 Fatter Than Firefox and XP

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  • It's also _BETA_ (Score:5, Insightful)

    by _bug_ ( 112702 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:13AM (#24843679) Journal

    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.

    • by EvanED ( 569694 ) <evaned@ g m a i l . com> on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:16AM (#24843729)

      Sometimes I disagree, like when we're talking about features.

      Here? Yes, you're right. Beta software is often compiled with less optimization and extra debugging information. I was using VMWare Server 2 beta, and it ran painfully slow, well under the speed of Server 1. Because it was a beta.

      • by Tolkien ( 664315 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @12:58PM (#24845767) Journal

        Agreed, complaining about performance at this stage in IE8's development is unfair.

        However, if we don't complain, they won't put as much effort into tuning its' performance.

        That said, it's slow and that's okay for now, but when it's released... *shakes fist threateningly at Microsoft* (even though I use Firefox).

      • Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:5, Interesting)

        by RobertM1968 ( 951074 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @05:51PM (#24850953) Homepage Journal

        While what you say is true to an extent, I still don't understand the use of 171 threads - especially on an operating system that has "spotty" lotsa thread handling performance at best (when compared to... well, anything else).

        Optimizing the code will probably increase performance and decrease memory usage a bit too, but unless all those threads are being used for debugging purposes, then various performance and resource issues will still exist when IE8 is out of beta.

        Threads are a great thing. Even a lot of threads are a great thing... but those have prerequisites, such as thread workload that is independent of each other to a decent extent, not overrunning the operating system's ability to efficiently manage and schedule threads, not overrunning the various subsystems that each thread (or a lot of them) may be calling (for instance, in this case, the hard drive, TCP/IP stack and/or rendering engine), and a design that scales down to resource availability of the computer hardware (you dont want to try to use that many resources or threads on a slow computer... CPU, bus, RAM, HDD, etc).

        Thus, the real remaining questions are (since you probably/hopefully correctly covered the memory footprint issue in pointing out it is a beta and probably has a lot of debug code loaded/running) are:
        - Is IE8's threading model designed to be usable on low end hardware?
        - Can the XP or Vista thread scheduler efficiently handle that many threads?
        - When they designed this implementation, did they take into account hardware capabilities?
        - And of course, how much of the bloat is actually due to the debug code, and how much (like in recent MS products) is "bloat by design"?

        Until then, I've got no real opinion on how IE8 will perform, since there is a lack of too much necessary information to make an intelligent determination on a product that has yet to be released as GA.

        And after then, honestly, I (personally) really dont care. I only fire up IE to test web pages - or for the relatively rare (nowadays) IE only site.

        As for the rest of the world, they will either find it's speed acceptable, or not. If they don't, they will either find Firefox - or not.

        Either way, the bigger issue (at least on any web programmer's mind) is standards compatibility... not speaking for anyone but myself, unless the performance is so horrendous that I now have to be coding "lite" sites so IE8 doesnt take forever to render them, then I really dont care if it's bloated or not. Me ranting about the bloat would be just that... ranting. Doesn't affect me unless the performance noticeaby impacts how quickly my sites load.

        Though it is fun to rant any time ________ screws something up (fill in the blank with whatever company or product currently fits the "Mod this post up" criteria... I stopped keeping track of who we are supposed to rant about weeks ago). ;-)

    • by spectre_240sx ( 720999 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:17AM (#24843765) Homepage

      OK. We can compare it to FF3 beta, then. That was fast as hell.

      • Re:It's also _BETA_ (Score:4, Informative)

        by mikkelm ( 1000451 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @12:15PM (#24844993)

        I think the concept of beta testing is lost on you, and a good few moderators as well, apparently. Performance during beta testing is not in any way indicative of the performance of the final product, and performance optimisation during beta is such an individual thing that you cannot establish any kind of gold standard for beta performance, or even get remotely close to having a basis for performance comparison. It's like comparing the visual quality of notes taken during classes. It's not telling on any level of how well you're going to do on your exams.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          To an extent yes... and the memory bloat may or may not be indicative of the final result, but 171 concurrent threads is an absurdly large number of threads given what the browser is actually doing, and given the added complexity of threaded code, that number scares me from the standpoint of stability. Just as a quick sanity check, Firefox currently only has 17 threads running. Opened up a few more tabs and it seemed to hover around 19. closed the tabs and it dropped back down to 17 after a little bit.
      • apples to oranges (Score:4, Interesting)

        by ILongForDarkness ( 1134931 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @12:33PM (#24845349)
        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.
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jlarocco ( 851450 )

        Well, you *can*, but you'll still look like a moron by anybody who has a clue.

    • by kannibal_klown ( 531544 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:40AM (#24844269)

      Blame Google.

      I know too many people that think "beta" means Gold (or at least Release Candidate). I wouldn't be surprised if they now think "beta" is synonymous with freeware.

      Anything beta should be given a lot leeway in terms of stability and performance.

      On the other hand, if the difference is DRASTICALLY different from past versions then maybe it brings some pause. While it could simply be the package isn't optimized and there are debug lines in there, it is also possible that it is a sign that the end-product might be a hog.

    • by jollyreaper ( 513215 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:45AM (#24844381)

      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.

      Microsoft is a lot like Google in that their software never makes it out of beta; unlike Google, they don't admit it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Zymergy ( 803632 ) *
      While having several friends possessed the newest ISO images, some of the Beta versions of "Vista" ran faster and were noticeably less bloated than the released version of "Vista"...
      I cannot imagine any company creating more of a Rube Goldberg software creation than Vista has become and now it seems IE8 (beta) is no different... If I had wanted a Swiss Army-Knife, I'd have bought one...
      They should have named Vista: "Steve Vaught"... but then again, it cannot shed its pounds by walking across America as
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by clone53421 ( 1310749 )

        While having several friends possessed the newest ISO images, some of the Beta versions of "Vista" ran faster and were noticeably less bloated than the released version of "Vista"...

        Do you mean the released version of "Vista", or do you mean Vista + all the bundled software you will ever need, courtesy of Dell/Compaq/etc.? Because I can readily see where the difference might lie...

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by thermian ( 1267986 )

      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.

      This conception is partly Google's fault. They release so many products as 'beta' which in actual fact are finished, but going to have alterations made later, that a lot of people have forgotten what beta really means.

      I release beta's only for intermediate and not fully tested versions of my software which I don't really expect to be usable yet, they are most often released for interested people to lift out the code they want and/or test it. Google release products that they expect millions to use as they a

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by mstahl ( 701501 )

        I think Google does it that way because, for a hosted web application, version numbers are meaningless. There's just "the version", the one that's up there. It's not like you could have two people using different versions of Google Documents somewhere. Knowing that, and knowing that they're never "finished", it makes sense that they're just always in beta.

    • by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <akaimbatman@nospaM.gmail.com> on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @12:10PM (#24844905) Homepage Journal

      Not only that, but I'd like to point out that process isolation comes at a cost. Many users were rejoicing yesterday when it was announced that Google Chrome would have process isolation. Google was very up front about the fact that the browser would use MORE memory as a result. However, the security, memory cleanup, process tracking, and isolation features were all considered worth it.

      So give IE a break here. If you want to complain, complain about the fact that it STILL doesn't support the standards and that it STILL uses that God-awful IE7 interface.

      • by Tweenk ( 1274968 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @01:42PM (#24846491)

        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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by julesh ( 229690 )

        Not only that, but I'd like to point out that process isolation comes at a cost.

        Agreed, and a total of 17 threads per tab doesn't seem an unreasonable cost for what it gives us: browser tabs and windows that can be managed independently, even when one is stuck in an infinite loop of javascript.

        And the memory usage doesn't seem _that_ bad, either. No worse than FF2 was for similar scenarios, in my experience. We've got spoiled by the good memory usage stats of FF3.

        And, no, I don't see 300-400MB of browser

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by neokushan ( 932374 )

      Completely agreed. What's more, the comparisons being made are wholly unfair. IE8 bigger than XP? Only in terms of memory usage and I'd like to think an OS would be kind enough to NOT use a lot of RAM.
      Plus, memory usage depends entirely on the sites being visited. The tests they made were specifically designed to hit very content-heavy sites with all sorts of crap on them, so higher memory usage is to be expected. Sure, FF3 handles it better, but it's still "more bloated" than every MS OS before XP, accordi

  • by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohn&gmail,com> on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:13AM (#24843681) Journal
    Well, I know this is asking for it, but I'll try to focus on the positives of IE8 from a web developer viewpoint [microsoft.com].

    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:

    • CSS Tool -- Display various rules defined by style sheets loaded by your Web page.
    • Script Debugging -- The built-in lightweight debugger enables you to set breakpoints and to step through client-side script without leaving Internet Explorer.
    • Script Profiler -- Visually determine where your script is taking most of its time.
    • Version Mode Switching -- Switch into different browser modes to test content for standards compliance.

    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.

    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 ... even if it assumes RAM is cheap and your CPU has over 171 cores to spare.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by pizzach ( 1011925 )
      I was tickled pink when I discovered that my latest page displays correctly in IE8b2 with absolutely no tweaks. It's a strange feeling having the page display the same (with the same code!) in all major browsers.
    • by gfxguy ( 98788 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:47AM (#24844431)

      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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Just Some Guy ( 3352 )

      I do not think all is lost on this browser, however ... even if it assumes RAM is cheap and your CPU has over 171 cores to spare.

      I currently have 191 processes on my dual-core processor. I also have an OS that knows how to run more than one program at a time. Basically, I'd rather have an interactive program that splits its load over 171 threads or processes and let the OS handle scheduling than one that tries to do everything in one thread or process. After all, the OS has a few decades of optimizations for exactly this under its belt.

  • Microsoft bashing? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by adpsimpson ( 956630 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:13AM (#24843683)

    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.

    • by AvitarX ( 172628 ) <me@brandywinehun ... Nrg minus author> on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:18AM (#24843787) Journal

      Also, 380 MB for a multi-tab session would be about what I expect.

      Firefox will happily use that much RAM.

      Currently 4 tabs RSIZE 129M VSIZE 412M on OSX

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by the_B0fh ( 208483 )

            PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
          250 firefox-bi 21.1% 87:01:17 37 824 6082 472M 24M 525M 1433M

      • by pla ( 258480 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:41AM (#24844307) Journal
        Also, 380 MB for a multi-tab session would be about what I expect. Firefox will happily use that much RAM.

        Y'know, I hear that a lot, but have just never seen any version of FireFox use all that much memory.

        Right now, I have about 8 tabs open (after many hours of browsing without restarting FF), including a flash game, a GIS on about the 20th page, and a Fark photoshopping contest, and have 70MB working set (RSize), 125MB Virtual (VSize). And that looks pretty much typical on my system for FireFox.
    • by e2d2 ( 115622 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:24AM (#24843903)

      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.

      It seems Google thinks the same. Chrome will have this as a feature supposedly.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:25AM (#24843919)

      Actually, IE uses one process per tab. This means that each tab has a different address space, and this is what makes it so that one bad tab crashes only itself and not the entire browser. If they were only doing threads, it'd be what Mozilla does.

    • by Idaho ( 12907 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:32AM (#24844097)

      Multi threaded browsing is a plus. One of my pet hates of Firefox is the one-bad-tab-crashes-the-browser problem.

      What is interesting, is that people seem to completely miss how multithreading works - because it will not solve that problem, at all. If, in a multithreaded application, one thread violates some memory restriction (e.g. stack overflow or accessing already released memory), the entire application will crash just like any other (single-threaded) application.

      What multithreading *can* help solve though, is the random "freezing up" of Firefox whenever another tab decides to reload itself, or when a wayward Flash plugin causes the entire browser to freeze for indefinite amounts of time, etc.

      The programmers of Firefox are very obviously aware of these problems, but it's incredibly hard to change the event-handling system once you have a complete application. Especially since these days, Javascript is used to do large-scale manipulations of the document, it becomes really hard to decide what data to share between threads, prevent race conditions and the inadvertent introduction new security risks, etc. etc.

      So I'm sure we'll see quite a few problems with these new "multi-threaded" browsers, before the technology matures.

  • Wow.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by 8127972 ( 73495 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:17AM (#24843757)

    We finally found something that sucks more CPU power than Crysis.

  • by Deathdonut ( 604275 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:19AM (#24843823)
    ...still use Lynx.
  • Beta... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GreyWolf3000 ( 468618 ) * on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:21AM (#24843841) Journal
    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.
  • Well, duhh.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Idaho ( 12907 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:22AM (#24843859)

    From the article:

    saturating the CPU with nearly six times as many execution threads

    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...

  • Beta and debug code (Score:5, Informative)

    by Aphrika ( 756248 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:24AM (#24843887)
    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'...
  • bullshit (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kuciwalker ( 891651 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:24AM (#24843901)
    "Consuming twice as much RAM as Firefox and saturating the CPU with nearly six times as many execution threads"

    Unless those threads are actually processing anything, they represent basically zero overhead.

  • by Bullfish ( 858648 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:29AM (#24844011)
    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
  • by rpp3po ( 641313 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:31AM (#24844075)

    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.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:34AM (#24844139)

    My heart stopped for a moment as I thought i'd read 'faster'...

  • by truthsearch ( 249536 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:37AM (#24844213) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:44AM (#24844379)

    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

  • Porcine (Score:5, Funny)

    by javilon ( 99157 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:45AM (#24844387) Homepage

    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 [wikipedia.org]

  • 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

  • Google Chrome (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nmg196 ( 184961 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:55AM (#24844593)

    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.

  • by olddotter ( 638430 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:56AM (#24844637) Homepage

    http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/# [google.com]

    I wonder how Chrome will compare resource wise. Its a 1 PROCESS per Tab model.

  • by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @11:59AM (#24844693) Homepage Journal
    Does anyone know what a developer workstation at Microsoft looks like? Judging from the software they're putting out, I'd guess that the specs are something like a top of the line dual 64 bit processor with 2 or more gigabytes of RAM, ultra-high-end video cards and tons of hard disk space.

    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.

  • 171 Threads! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Omega1045 ( 584264 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @12:31PM (#24845315)
    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).
  • Considering.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anachragnome ( 1008495 ) on Tuesday September 02, 2008 @03:43PM (#24848637)

    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?

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