Thread: Browsing and performance

As long as I was at sites that presented no problems (more on this in a second), browsing was fairly speedy-commendable for a beta I! But certain major sites produced major problems and took an inordinately long time to load. My Yahoo! was a notable member of this class. In addition to the performance issue, my wood-grain background to this portal didn't display properly, and IE8 could not retrieve the calendar drop-down from the Per¬sonal Assistant area. Adding injury to insult, the beta IE8 took over 90 percent of my CPU activity when on this site.

Other sites, such as PCMag.com, CNN, eBay, and The New York Times, had no particular speed issues with the beta browser in its new render¬ing mode. The beta even worked with the fussy Citibank Web site, but it did generate an "unsup¬ported browser error" when I tried logging in to the Fidelity financial site. Thankfully, IE8 restores your last session if your session closes abnormally-read crashes-with its new Automatic Crash Recovery feature.



Unfortunately, this feature didn't show up after every crash I experienced. In memory usage, IE8 was right on a par with the current released ver¬sion of Firefox. With the same three sites loaded, it used 50MB, while Firefox 2 used 51MB. Start-up time isn't a problem for the new browser, either; a warm restart took under 2 seconds and a cold start after a reboot required less than 5 seconds. This is far better than the Firefox 3 beta did.