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."

It's also _BETA_

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.

Re:It's also _BETA_

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.

Re:It's also _BETA_

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

Re:It's also _BETA_

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.

At Least Some Features Are a Step Forward

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.

Microsoft bashing?

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.

Re:Microsoft bashing?

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:Microsoft bashing?

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.

Re:Microsoft bashing?

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.

Chrome will have one process per tab as a feature. See here. [gamesforthebrain.com]

Re:Microsoft bashing?

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.

Re:Microsoft bashing?

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....

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

Beta...

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.

Beta and debug code

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

"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.

Porcine? Of course...

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

171 threads may actually be a good sign!

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.

More "demanding" than XP

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.

have we forgotten chrome already?

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

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]

Re:Firefox is a pig

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?

Re:Firefox is a pig

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.

Re:Firefox is a pig

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.

Check the current poll, man.

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."

Re:Real geeks...

Real geeks parse the HTTP responses in their head.