Comments on: IE 8 Beta Released – A First Look

By: Jack Rayen

Jack Rayen — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:49:14 +0000

You really are a loser. Writing about something you haven’t even tested. Very good. If you don’t have anything worthwhile, why don’t go take a nap instead ? Maybe you will get some other good ideas to write about.

By: shidan

shidan — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 18:52:01 +0000

“the fact that iexplore.exe is so likely to crash, that it’s worth designing an entire user experience workflow around capturing and managing such crashes, simply reiterates my previous position.”

LOL. You could not have said it better. Been telling stalwart IE users this for years.

By: admin

admin — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 06:57:27 +0000

Just read it, and you’re right – it does go into some detail. However, you’re wrong about Firefox – FF3 beta has a fairly complete session state recovery, including form contents, nav history, etc.

While the idea of running each tab in a separate process is an interesting workaround for a buggy and insecure execution environment, the fact that iexplore.exe is so likely to crash, that it’s worth designing an entire user experience workflow around capturing and managing such crashes, simply reiterates my previous position.

Since I’ve not profiled it yet, I won’t go into any speculation about the performance impacts of running a separate executable for each tab, with asynchronous communication with the chrome. However, you can look at the sad and sorry state of RoR scalability (using mongrel clusters and apache, etc), to see the impacts of this sort of architecture.

I *was* heartened to see that, although MS recommends some site-specific implementations to fully support bookmarking of page state, they have embraced the HTML5 W3C draft, and used the onHashChange event for this.

From a development community standpoint, I find it interesting that Microsoft asserts that “Over 70% of all Internet Explorer crashes and hangs are caused by extensions, such as ActiveX® controls, Browser
Helper Objects (BHOs), and Toolbars”. While Mozilla is even more exposed to abuse by extensions, and has a thriving developer community (1,986 extensions listed in AMO this evening), a constant plague of crashes caused by extensions doesn’t seem to be such a problem in the open-source world.

From a user-experience standpoint, it simply shouldn’t crash. While mitigating the damage done is a nice band-aid, *I* wouldn’t label it a “feature”.

By: Kevin Nguyen

Kevin Nguyen — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 04:03:30 +0000

It seems that you haven’t read the Automatic Crash Recovery whitepaper.
It goes into some details about ACR. I personally think it’s a pretty unique idea in that the tabs are isolated from other tabs. And as far as I can tell, it’s not available in Firefox. Firefox has a simple session recovery.

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ie8whitepapers/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=582