Wednesday, September 3, 2008
IE8 “Epically Porcine”
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.
Google’s Chrome browser has been available for just about a day and the first reviews are slowly beginning to hit the Web. They’re largely positive, although in that “worthy, but largely unexciting” sort of way typically reserved for new Microsoft operating systems. Here’s a quick roundup of first impressions.
“With its view of the Web as a Web of applications, and its multi-process/multi-application design, Google Chrome almost seems more a Web desktop than a Web browser, doesn’t it?” Seems I wasn’t alone in asking that question yesterday as a flurry of research notes published today suggests.
It’s taken nearly a decade but Microsoft has finally debuted the first significant overhaul of its Web browser since Internet Explorer 5. The company released IE8 Beta 2 Wednesday afternoon, and by most accounts, it’s a solid update. In fact, it might even put IE on par with competing browsers like Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari. 
Apple’s Safari browser has offered “private browsing” since 2005, Firefox since 2006 (via the Stealther extension), and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer may soon offer it as well. Earlier this week, Natya Nadella, senior VP of Microsoft’s search, portal and advertising platform group, said the company is planning to give IE 8 a privacy feature for erasing search histories and the other data that browsers often log automatically.
Looks like Firefox 3 Download Day will be one for the record books after all. Though its servers were initially overwhelmed by the volume of download requests yesterday, Mozilla soon had the Firefox 3 download site humming along nicely. Within five hours it had broken Firefox 2’s single-day record of 1.6 million downloads and by 5 a.m. PDT today–18 hours into its world record attempt–it had already blown the doors off the 5 million mark it had set for itself with 6,424,790 downloads.
After seven months in beta the latest iteration of the application that reignited the browser wars is finally here. Firefox 3 debuts today and to mark the occasion, Mozilla, the nonprofit behind the popular open-source Web browser, is rallying users to help it set a Guinness World Record for highest number of software downloads in a single day.
