You think Vista is bloated? IE8 consumes more RAM than all of XP
By Justin Montgomery
Not that Microsoft needs any more bad press, but a recently completed study indicates that the latest version of Internet Explorer, or IE8, actually consumes more RAM than all of the Windows XP operating system combined. Not only is Internet Explorer getting "fatter" with every so-called "newer" version, but it’s also becoming more resource intensive than ever.
InfoWorld is reporting that a site called "exo.performance.network" conducted the study using a 10-site browsing scenario featuring popular sites like Fox News, CNet, and the New York Times. The test involved comparing IE8 to IE7, as well as FireFox 3.01 running on two separate machines- Windows XP (SP3) and Vista (SP1). They then used a DMS Clarity Tracker agent to record system and process metrics from the test boxes. The results were pretty surprising, though to some it’s what they expected.
Some of the main points the study pointed out was that IE8 has a 350-400MB memory footprint, uses 150-200 concurrent execution threads, and uses a ridiculous 6 discrete iexplore.exe process instances every time it runs. This means that it’s well over two times more demanding then FireFox. With older machines, this can mean big problems. The worst part is, this is the newest version. Shouldn’t it be getting smaller, and less resource intensive as the software improves?
It’s hard to believe that a simple web-browser can consume more RAM on a machine than the entire OS that it runs on. It really makes no sense at all. With steep competition from the open-source FireFox browser that’s constantly gaining momentum, along with the other competitors such as Google- who just released their long-anticipated "Chrome" browser. With that kind of heat, I would focus of making Internet Explorer as compact and open as possible. Instead, Microsoft did the exact opposite. A tester had this to say; "if I boot XP (SP3) on a 1GB system, I have more than 800MB free. Add IE8 to the mix and, depending on the site workload, I can suddenly find myself with less than half that."
The situation seems to be even worse under Vista. IE8 is fatter than Microsoft’s word processor (Word 2007), spreadsheet (Excel 2007), and presentation software (PowerPoint 2007) combined. "It’s even fatter than Visual Studio 2008 with 10,000 lines of code and several complex, multi-part Web forms loaded into the IDE," it says in the study. No matter how it’s compared, IE8 is severely bloated. When adding it to an already bloated Vista OS, you better hope you have a very fast machine.
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September 3rd, 2008
This is because of the new parallelization that is taking place. Intel is releasing Larrabee, and processors aren’t getting faster, just more parallel. It looks like Microsoft is doing both an excellent job and a terrible job of parrallelizing IE.
The performance will probably be extraordinary on machines with 2GB of memory. But on a machine with 256MB or 512MB, which is what exists on many business machines, there could be problems.
September 5th, 2008
Last I checked IE8 was beta. Hasn’t anyone around here worked with beta releases before? Typically betas tend to suck up alot more memory due to all of the debugging code and other junk in there. Give them time to release an official version before criticizing the product.
September 5th, 2008
Hello JimH,
Anyone who has ever worked with software from Microsoft has worked with beta releases - after all, it’s a time-honoured method for Microsoft to use their unsuspecting customers as beta testers. Of course, you may be correct, and the official IE8 release won’t be horrendeously bloated - just really badly bloated.
Talking of “other junk” in betas, do you have any idea if there is still a flight simulator in Microsoft Excel?
September 13th, 2008
But on a machine with 256MB or 512MB, which is what exists on many business machines, there could be problems.