It looks innocent enough. But underneath lurks a monster. Not a nice friendly one like a Firefox. Consider it a hugh, ungainly troll or something of that sort. Consider this:
I’ve got 3 tabs open : My WordPress post page, my Gmail inbos and a PCWorld article. Memory usage? – 285 MB!
No, that isn’t a typo, nor have I missed a decimal or something. I mean, you can run an entire OS for less RAM than that, and a simple web browser decides to lord it over my system. And I haven’t really got all that many resources to spare here. On checking the task manager, I find that there are a total of 3-4 processes for iexplore.exe. Each taking a humungous amount of RAM. And it’s not exactly as if IE8 is the zippiest browser around, as I pointed out in my earlier post.
Plus, I doubt the level of security of this browser, seeing Microsoft’s past record with IE. Seeing the level of browser integration with the OS, a small security loophole could just compromise the entire system. Thankfully, XP and Ubuntu are still around. I’m sure it’s just a piece of swiss cheese with a ‘blue e’ pasted on top.
And for some reason, it won’t automatically open the last Browsing Session, unlike Firefox, which asks you the first time you close the browser. Instead, all it asked me the first time I closed it, was whether I wanted to close the current tab or the entire browser. Speaks a lot about what Microsoft thinks of its customers…
Haven’t yet used WebSlices, mainly because I don’t really need it. Nevertheless, the big shocker was the memory leak. <shakes head>
May 19, 2009 at 12:14 am
1. WebSlices only work on sites modified to use it.
2. People who are mostly likely to use WebSlices are tech-savvy users – or at least those who use RSS feeds.
3. Tech-savvy users use browsers _other_ than IE – Firefox, Safari, Opera.
4. Nobody will use WebSlices.
5. Micro$oft is dumb. QED.
May 19, 2009 at 10:34 am
You got three tabs open. WordPress post, Gmail Inbox (I’m guessing you have Labs enabled) and a PCWorld article. Opening that in Firefox takes about a 150MB too.
May 19, 2009 at 4:01 pm
@Ankur – Nice, make perfect sense.
@Aditya – You’re kinda wrong there…I tried it out, and it consumed around 80-85 MB only. IE’s RAM usage is unjustifiable.
May 20, 2009 at 10:42 am
@The GroundNut: No beta. At my place, it takes ~150 MB. But still, nowhere near IE8. More RAM probably because of integration with core OS. Do NOT think I like IE.
May 20, 2009 at 11:56 am
Aditya and IE, sitting on a tree…:-P
May 29, 2009 at 5:36 am
You got three tabs open. WordPress post, Gmail Inbox (I’m guessing you have Labs enabled) and a PCWorld article. Opening that in Firefox takes about a 150MB too.