Inside IE 8 RC1 with Dean Hachamovitch and Jason Upton

Posted By: Charles | Jan 26th @ 2:34 PM | 65,321 Views | 50 Comments
IE team General Manager Dean Hachamovitch and IE Test Manager Jason Upton sit down with me to discuss the significance of today's IE 8 RC1 release. What did the IE team learn from the Beta 2 release? What changes did they make in response to customer feedback? Will the IE team still take and act upon fedback now that RC1 is here? With so many browsers on the market today how does IE remain competitive and maintain marketshare? No conversation on IE can be complete, of course, without talking about the web platform and standards so we go there....

Of course, you can expect this discussion to continue at MIX09 (and you'll be a key participant in the conversation with Dean and team in Vegas).

See the IE Blog for more detailed info on what's in IE8 RC1.

Tune in. This is a great conversation with two key leaders behind and in front of IE (Dean is the all up team leader (as you know by now given how many times you've seen him on C9 and at various conferences) and Jason is responsible for overall product quality (he owns the stuff you seldom see or hear about - software testing)).
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#Jan 26th @ 4:51 PM
RoyalSchrubber
RoyalSchrubber
One. How many time travellers does it take to change a lightbulb?
So I hope  Dean Hachamovitch or Jason Upton or anyone else in IE team reads this because I want to tell them, and I'm sorry for harsh words, that if I were their boss I'd fire them. Because you absolutely deserve it for not fixing the 'bmp pictures' bug.

An hour ago I've downloaded IE8 RC1 on 32 bit Vista Business with SP1, fully updated and what bothers me is a bug that was partially responsible for me switching to an alternative browser.  When you right click on picture and select 'Save As Picture' the only available format is bmp file.
This bug cannot be always reproduced, it's affected by header information that comes with picture, but personally I can always reproduce this bug on this site. I've looked for a solution on internet, but it seems they are all written for older versions of either IE or OS - deleting temporary files doesn't work and it's not possible to empty 'Downloaded Program Files' folder under Vista as is suggested in KB article.

Now I've done some research (read googling) and it seems the error is caused because IE sometimes (I guess probably for perfomance reasons - to save memory in ram) discards original format and keeps only bitmap representation that is convenient beacause this is format that can be displayed with the least amout of cpu processing. I'm fine with that, but why couldn't you redownload image when user selects 'Save As Picture' menu  - or at least convert it back into original format if resending picture file is not possible. If you click 'Properties' on that same menu, IE reports original format (so IE certainly has some knowledge about format of original format), so why not convert it back - I don't really mind artifacts that will come with encoding back bitmap to original lossy format (like jpg).
 
I can't stand BMP files on my disk - you may think it's good enough, it gives you few megabytes smaller memory footprint (but you already eat tens of megabytes), problem is everybody else does it correctly - Firefox, Opera, Chrome and others. 

You could say I'm a bit of ms fanboy, you don't see me using that tone often - but really - it's either you are doing this intentionally and aiming for cheap way to lose few megabytes in memory with too aggreessive cache regime , or - and there is argument for this, you are not doing this on purpose and are just too incompetent to fix this bug that, according to previously mentioned KB article, has been plaguing IE since July 2000 - when IE 5.5 was released. 8 years.

Again sorry for angry words, but it's about time you fix this bug - otherwise IE is great, I love accelerators.
#Jan 26th @ 5:07 PM
DeanH
DeanH
Dean here -- Jason and I are sitting next to each other (again). We read your post. We're looking into the issue now. Thanks for pointing it out!
#Jan 26th @ 5:12 PM
Otherwise82
Otherwise82
NERD RAGE OMG YAY!!!!!!!!
#Jan 26th @ 5:13 PM
Dexter
Dexter

I'm not sure what to complain about: IE saving as bmp or that site sending images with a pragma: no-cache header. I think I'll complain about the second Smiley.

#Jan 26th @ 5:14 PM
aL_
aL_
Rx ftw
the bitmap bug (once again) verified on vista 64 ie8rc btw.. but that is really strange bug imo.. it seems like something that wold be so trivial to fix, the app already knows the url to the image O_o and even if we ignore that, how hard is it to convert something to a jpg? frickin paint can do that.. Smiley

im a ie fan i gotta say and im really happy the zoomed-in perf has improved in the rc Smiley what i dont get is why the ie team doesnt use .net more.. imo, it should all be managed code.
also, memory consumption is just silly.. and avg of 50 (fifty!) megs for one tab..? come on.. sure thats the private bytes and taskmanager is not exactly a great profiler.. but still, that really taks a lot of explaining..

ie has come a long way but i still feel microsoft could really do even better :/


--edit post watch--
this is a really interesting video imo, dont devalue it guys Smiley ie is a very central bit of software and there are a few things in the design of iw that seem strange to the outside observer.. because of that, i find it really interesting to hear how the ie team thinks about stuff Smiley it would be interesting to hear about the i.e teams oppinion of .net and why they haent adopted it more, im sure there is a reason Smiley (though i still think ie would be better of if it was .net Wink )
#Jan 26th @ 5:43 PM
Harlequin
Harlequin
http://twitter.c​om/TrueHarlequin
Acid 2 was mentioned. What about the Acid 3 test? IC8 RC1 gets 12/100, Firefox 3.0.5 gets 71/100, even tried it in Flock 1.2.7 and it gets a 53/100.
#Jan 26th @ 5:49 PM
Dexter
Dexter
Care to show me a browser that doesn't use 50 megabytes for a page (tab)? Smiley. It's funny because I keep seeing browser users complaining about their browser (IE, Firefox etc.) consuming a lot of memory but if you open the same web page in all of them and then take a closer look at various memory numbers you see that at the end of the day they all use tens of megabytes of memory. For example http://channel9.msdn.com (private bytes usage as reported by ProcessExplorer running on Vista):

IE8RC1: ~37 mbytes
Chrome: ~36 mbytes
Firefox: ~54 mbytes
Safari: ~50 mbytes
#Jan 26th @ 6:00 PM
aL_
aL_
Rx ftw
i dont think thats a valid reason for consuming that amount of memory Smiley so what if the current generation of browsers are all memory hogs.. that doesnt change the fact applications that have more complex ui require much less memory..

--edit--

this is atleast how it seems to me Smiley i just think its strange that a relativly small amount of html and js and other fluff can take up so much memory in such  a consistent fashion

 id love to hear the ie team talk about why im wrong Smiley

--edit2--

fyi i get ~45mb when going to channel9 Smiley i also noticed that the memory doesnt go down when i leave a page, but privte bytes dont tell the full story so maybe thats nothing to worry about..
#Jan 26th @ 6:45 PM
finches
finches
Yay IE8 zoom in XP works without completely bogging down the rendering!  RC1 is way more polished than the beta. 
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