Demonstrating that the entire world doesn't have to be delayed on account of Microsoft Office 2007, the company's Internet Explorer 7 team triumphantly plowed ahead with its Beta 3 release this morning. If the troubles we had with installing IE7 Beta 3 - after repeated uninstallations and Registry tweaks - is indicative of the problems others are having across North America, then maybe the bad news doesn't stop here.
Once up and running, Beta 3 is a somewhat improved version, with welcome changes primarily in the RSS feed handling department. Some of its speed, which was clearly missing from the Beta 2 release, has now happily returned. When no default search provider has been entered into the search tool, IE7 now installs Windows Live (Default), though it clearly gives the user the option to change this default. Previous editions referred to MSN Search.
The new IE7 remains a small download, at least by modern standards, and certainly by Microsoft's: under 13 MB, which over broadband connections still takes less than a minute. But the real conservation takes place with respect to the memory footprint; and here, Microsoft's familiarity with its own operating system pays off yet again. In our initial tests, when we loaded four of TG Publishing's own front pages into memory, then checked memory consumption in Task Manager, both IE7 Beta 3 and Firefox 1.5.4 consumed about 64 MB of system memory, with Firefox slightly more than IE7. But when both programs were minimized, something almost magic happened: IE7 released most of its memory back to the system; Firefox did not. In a minimized state, Firefox still consumed 57 MB of memory, while IE7 dropped to below 10 MB.
Upon restoration, Firefox stayed put at around 57 MB, but IE7 recalled page content only when necessary. As we clicked on tabs, IE7 gradually reclaimed more memory, but only expanded to a footprint below 31 MB, with the same four pages loaded as before.
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