Digital Daily » Devil Mountain Software

Yahoo Shares Trade South for Winter

John Paczkowski — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:44:31 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

IE8 "Epically Porcine"

John Paczkowski — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:37:14 +0000

Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is significantly faster than IE7. It’s more stable and feature-rich than its predecessor as well. But it’s also something of a resource pig. IE8 Beta 2 consumes 52 percent more memory than IE7 and uses more than double the number of processor threads. In fact, it’s the most resource-intensive version of the Web browser to date, according to Florida-based independent software research firm Devil Mountain Software. “IE8 is epically porcine,” said Devil Mountain CTO Craig Barth. “Microsoft has gone to epic levels of bloat.”

In a 10-site scenario test comparing IE8 with IE7 and FireFox 3.01 running on Windows Vista (SP1), Devil Mountain found that IE8 Beta 2 consumed 380MB of memory to IE7’s 250MB and Firefox 3.0.1’s 159MB. IE8 Beta 2 also used significantly more processor threads than the browsers, generating a hefty 171 threads compared with IE7 and Firefox 3.0.1, which generated 65 and 29, respectively.

That’s a dramatic difference, although to be fair, Microsoft (MSFT) has designated IE8 Beta 2 as “Beta” for a reason, and comparing it with release-quality software isn’t exactly fair. That said, Firefox 3 beta consumed nowhere near the amount of memory IE8 Beta 2 seems to require.

Apple Tops Customer Satisfaction Survey For Time Being

John Paczkowski — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:00:33 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

Windows Vistaster: The "Ow" Starts Now

John Paczkowski — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:29:18 +0000

Windows Vista may end up being the least-desired best-selling OS in the history of operating systems. New research suggests that more than one in three new Vista PCs is downgraded to Windows XP. Performance and metrics researcher Devil Mountain Software reports that its survey of over 3,000 Vista PCs revealed nearly 35 percent to be running XP. “Either these machines were downgraded by [sellers like] Dell (DELL) or HP (HPQ), or they were downgraded by the user after they got the machine,” Devil Mountain CTO Craig Barth told ComputerWorld. “In any case, these machines are no longer running Vista.”

An interesting data point to consider in light of Microsoft (MSFT) chairman Bill Gates’s claim earlier this year that sales of Windows Vista had reached 140 million copies worldwide. If Devil Mountain’s figures are accurate, Vista’s installed base is likely quite a bit less than that. That revelation is a humbling blow for Microsoft, which has been doing its damnedest to convince consumers that Vista is an OS worth running.