Internet Explorer 8 is not the fastest browser in the universe. This, according to IE Program Manager, Christian Stockwell, working on the performance of the browser. However, this is not to say that the Redmond company has not poured a consistent amount of efforts into boosting the performance of IE7’s successor. In fact, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, planned for release by the end of this month, will offer palpable proof of the new horsepower under the browser’s hood.
“When we took a hard look at our goals and considered what we could do to build the best browser, we were presented with a quandary. On the one hand, we could focus very narrowly on scripting performance, trusting that our investment would noticeably improve our users’ browsing experience. Alternatively, we could invest more broadly in realistic scenarios, measuring heavily-used subsystems and investing our optimization effort accordingly. We opted for the latter approach,” Stockwell noted.
Even as early as March 2008, IE GM Dean Hachamovitch indicated that JavaScript performance was up 2.5 times, the Gmail inbox was loading 34% faster, the task of opening a new conversation took 45% less time, while that of opening a thread 25% less. With IE8 Beta 2, Microsoft has tweaked the execution time for the browser, but it has also managed to speed up navigation and user interaction.
In the end, Microsoft went well beyond JavaScript when it comes down to increasing the performance of the browser. In this context, improvements were introduced to scripting, memory management, networking, the rendering engine, and beyond.
“As part of our broader effort to improve performance in IE8, we did make large investments in JScript performance to make pages faster and to help developers be more productive. The JScript engine included with IE8 speeds up many common user scenarios. We have made huge improvements to widely-used JScript functionality including faster string, array, and lookup operations. We have also made changes to our core architecture to drastically reduce the cost of functions calls, object creation, and lookup patterns for variables scoped to the window or this objects,” Stockwell stated.
According to Microsoft, JavaScript performance in IE8 is with as much as 400% up from IE7. This percentage, while indeed impressive, pales next to the 700% JScript performance boost touted by compared with Mozilla for Firefox 3.1version 3.0.
The full code can be found in the TraceMonkey mercurial repository (the commit to merge TraceMonkey into Mozilla core is massive, clocking in at about 4MB).
If you want to try running your own copy of TraceMonkey on the command-line, just follow these steps:
hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/tracemonkey/
cd tracemonkey/js/src
make -f Makefile.ref BUILD_OPT=1
Darwin_OPT.OBJ/js -j
(The above assumes that you already have Mercurial installed, and are trying to compile on OS X. Your milage may vary. The -j option is what enables jit-ing on the command-line.)
“The second area in which we are invested heavily in IE8 is in improvements to our memory usage. To date, we have fixed just under 400 separate memory leaks in Internet Explorer. We have also worked hard to improve our heap fragmentation and memory usage on AJAX pages. For users, these changes reduce the amount of memory consumed by IE, improve our startup times, speed up navigating between pages, and help IE remain stable for longer periods of time. Besides these great benefits to end users, our work in this area should take a significant burden off of developers,” Stockwell revealed.
At the same time, IE8 will be tailored to high speed bandwidth connections, being capable of handling more than its precursor. In this regard, Internet Explorer 8 will support a larger number of parallel connections compared with IE7, and will benefit from an advanced system designed to manage downloads accompanied by external scripts. But, in the end, Microsoft has also hammered away at the underlying rendering engine of the browser.
“By our upcoming Beta 2 we expect our standards mode engine to be at parity with our previous implementation for many sites. Going forward we will continue to invest in this area with the goal that when IE ships, developers do not have to make any difficult decisions: developing for our new engine will produce sites that work better across browsers and as an added bonus they will be faster too,” Stockwell promised.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is available For Vista x86 here. or For Windows XP SP2 x86 here
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Written by Jason on August 29th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on 1340 and 1354 and 1426 and 1429 and 1673 and 169 and 2065 and 2157 and 401 and 544 and Browser and Contributors and Firefox and IE7 and IE8 and Internet and PC and Performance and gmail and ie and internet explorer 8 and javascript and memory and memory leak and memory management and microsoft and mozilla and optimization and program.
Add-ons are programs that add features to a web browser or change the way it works. If you’ve ever wished Internet Explorer could do something new or differently, chances are there’s an add-on out there that will fulfill your wish.
I must have tried out hundreds of add-ons over the years. In this column, I’ll talk about five add-ons that I use every day. They have all earned a place in my add-on stable because they really have made my online life easier, and I miss their presence when using somebody else’s computer.
Power users love IE7Pro
IE7Pro is a free add-on for Internet Explorer 7 that is indispensable to me in my day-to-day work. It adds a raft of new abilities to the web browser, including advanced management of tabbed browsing settings, a simple download manager, spelling checks of text you enter in web forms, autoscrolling of webpages, quick searching of page text, ad and Flash blocking, custom keyboard shortcuts, and much more.
One of my favorite features of this add-on is its ability to automatically refresh a tab at a specified interval. In my job as an IT coordinator, I use Internet Explorer to monitor several spam filters in my office. Unfortunately, none of the filters automatically refresh the browser to display the latest captured e-mail, so I was forced to manually refresh the webpages every so often. With IE7Pro, all I need to do is right-click the IE7Pro icon in the status bar, click Refresh Current Tab, and then pick my preferred refresh interval. This feature is also quite useful for seeing the latest messages coming into your web-based e-mail inbox and for keeping track of online auctions and message boards.
Do you want to search the Internet for something you’re reading about on a particular webpage? Instead of copying and pasting the text into a search box, simply select the word or phrase, right-click it, then click Search With to search for the term using Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, or another search engine of your choice. The results appear in a new tab.
Have you ever closed a tab by mistake? No worries click Tab History in the IE7Pro menu, and then click Reopen Last Closed Tab. Did Internet Explorer crash? IE7Pro will offer to restore the tabs that were open when the crash occurred.
Road warriors who frequently switch Internet connections will love IE7Pro’s proxy switcher. Instead of manually changing the proxy configuration each time you switch connections, you can quickly select previously used proxy servers from a menu.
I really haven’t done IE7Pro justice in this column. It offers far more than I have described above. To download it, go to the IE7Pro website.
Simple but effective: Find As You Type
To search for text on a webpage in Internet Explorer, normally you must press CTRL+F, type the search term into the Find window and then click Next. Find As You Type is an add-on that allows you to see all matches to your search term as it is typed. Matches are instantly highlighted on the page. If you type a combination of letters that does not appear on the page, an audio cue sounds and the Find box turns red.
For example, when I type “phish” into the toolbar, as in the screen capture below, all instances of “phish” on the page are immediately highlighted there is no need to click a button. You can step through each instance of matched text sequentially using the Next and Previous buttons on the toolbar. You can even set up Find As You Type to start searching as soon as you start typing on a webpage no CTRL+F required.
To download Find As You Type, go to the ookii.org website. Note that IE7Pro offers a very similar “instant find” feature. Therefore, if you choose to install IE7Pro, you don’t need to install Find As You Type. That being said, if you like the idea of enhanced searching and have no need for everything else IE7Pro offers, then Find As You Type is an excellent choice.
Organize your downloads with LeechGet
An Internet connection can be unreliable, and far too often I have felt the frustration that comes from having a large download interrupted. Restarting the download in Internet Explorer is hit-or-miss; sometimes I lose the partial download, and sometimes I don’t. I wanted a download manager that could take over from Internet Explorer and give me more control over what happens when things go wrong. My personal favorite is a product called LeechGet. It operates as a standalone program that integrates with Internet Explorer by managing downloads you click in the browser.
LeechGet allows you to manage multiple downloads, pause and resume, schedule downloads to occur at a particular time, and split your downloads into smaller “tasks.” You can also impose a “speed limit” on downloads that restricts how much bandwidth they can use, thus leaving you some bandwidth to browse the web. The program includes a download history and speed monitor.
LeechGet has two versions: a free version that limits you to one download at a time and does not include updates, and a paid version that removes those restrictions and includes technical support. To download it, go to the LeechGet website.
Make RSS shine with RikReader
Since the release of Internet Explorer 7 and its integrated RSS feed reader, I’ve become a very heavy user of RSS, and have subscribed to hundreds of different feeds (For more information about RSS feeds, see The wonderful world of RSS feeds).
As much as I enjoy the convenience of being able to detect, subscribe to, and read RSS feeds from within Internet Explorer, its feed reader has a couple of glaring deficiencies. First, there is no way to mark all feeds as read, which I like to do when I am very busy or behind on my reading. Second, there is no way to view all of my feeds at the same time. So I decided to find a feed reader that would take full advantage of the Windows RSS Platform. RikReader is my feed reader of choice. (Technically, RikReader is a program, rather than an add-on, but it integrates with the feed-subscription capabilities of Internet Explorer.)
RikReader displays the feeds you have subscribed to in Internet Explorer. It offers both a conventional two-pane view, with headlines on one side and article text on the other, and an impressive “newspaper” view that displays the full text of each article or blog post in a multicolumn layout. In either view, the text size can be easily reduced or enlarged via a slider. By typing a term in the search box, you can instantly filter a feed so that only articles containing that term are displayed.
If you have many feeds (in the hundreds), RikReader can be a bit slow to start up while it loads all of them. Things may also slow down when loading the newspaper view or when loading a feed with many hundreds of articles. In such circumstances, you can improve RikReader’s performance by setting it to display only unread articles.
RikReader is free and can be downloaded at the RikReader website. In lieu of charging a fee, the author promotes his Amazon.com wishlist, which makes for interesting reading.
Me.dium: An interaction revolution
Humans are inherently social creatures, and we love to interact with others online—hence the popularity of instant messaging, social networking sites, and online forums. In the end, though, web surfing has basically remained a solitary experience. We’ve always known that lots of other people are likely to be looking at the same page as we are, at the same time, but we couldn’t see or interact with them until now.
Me.dium is an add-on that allows you to peek behind the curtain of the web. After you install it, a Me.dium “map” appears in the left pane of the browser. The map displays an icon representing you and the website you are viewing, along with icons of other Me.dium users who are visiting the same site. Users you’ve added to your Me.dium friends list show up as yellow, and others show up as blue. Surrounding your icon are icons representing related sites that you or other Me.dium users have visited. For example, if you’re at a news site, Me.dium will show you other news sites; if you are at a bank’s website it will suggest other banking and financial sites. You can click an icon to go directly to that site.
It’s great fun to watch all of the activity revealed by Me.dium. Not only can you watch other Me.dium users as you and they move from site to site, you can also start a chat that every Me.dium user at the site can view and participate in. If a Me.dium user is on your friends list, you can begin instant messaging privately. Every message that you send includes a link to the site that you are currently viewing.
Be warned, though: Me.dium can be a real productivity sapper. As you interact with people and websites you might not have encountered otherwise, many hours may pass unnoticed. Also, while logged in to Me.dium, you may want to avoid visiting a site that may cause you embarrassment if revealed to your contacts. You may adore crocheting fluorescent-pink-and-yellow pillowcases, but some of your contacts might find your hobbies highly amusing. Fortunately, it only takes one click to turn off Me.dium, and sharing information with Me.dium is automatically disabled when you enter a secure site or a local intranet site.
To download this add-on, visit the Me.dium website.
Where do we go from here?
And there you have it; I’ve shown you how to add some very useful abilities to Internet Explorer. But the add-ons I’ve described here are only the tip of the iceberg. To browse hundreds more add-ons that can enhance your browser, visit the official Add-ons for Internet Explorer site.
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Written by Jason on August 28th, 2008 with no comments.
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Windows Vista includes a number of tools that you can use to pinpoint performance bottlenecks. Some of these, such as the System Health Report, the Windows Experience Index, and the Reliability Monitor, provide static snapshots showing the resources available to your system and where those resources might not be adequate to your needs. Others, such as the venerable Windows Task Manager, the new Resource Overview, and Performance Monitor (an improved version of the tool known in Windows XP as System Monitor), let you track a variety of performance metrics in real time.
In addition to these snapshot and monitoring utilities, Windows Vista incorporates the following forms of performance-enhancing technology: SuperFetch, ReadyBoost, ReadyDrive
All three of these are designed to reduce the amount of time your system spends engaged in performance degrading disk IO. SuperFetch is a memory management technology that observes your computer usage patterns over extended stretches of time (noting the programs you run and the days and times you typically run them) and adjusts caching behavior to accommodate your own particularities. ReadyBoost uses external memory devices (such as USB 2.0 flash disks) to cache disk content of all kinds, reducing the need for time consuming hard disk access. And ReadyDrive is technology that supports the use of hybrid hard disk drives drives that incorporate nonvolatile flash memory (NVRAM) as well as conventional rotating disk media. Hybrid drives are particularly useful for extending battery life on portable computers, because they reduce the need for drive spin.
SuperFetch is useful to anyone running Windows Vista. You don’t need to do anything except be glad that it’s there. ReadyDrive should be of interest if you’re in the market for a new computer and hybrid drives are a purchase option. ReadyBoost, in contrast, is of no value unless you implement it by attaching a suitable external memory device to your system. For details, see “Using ReadyBoost” later in this article.
This tips will review these basic performance enhancing strategies:
- Ensuring that you have adequate RAM
- Ensuring that you have an adequate virtual memory configuration
- Using ReadyBoost
- Managing startup programs
- Keeping your disks defragmented
- Maintaining adequate free space on your disks
- Avoiding tweaks of dubious value
Ensuring that you have adequate RAM
Random access memory (RAM) is the vital stuff that keeps Windows running smoothly. Having enough physical (main) memory helps reduce the operating system’s dependence on virtual memory, thereby minimizing the number of number of times Windows has to swap information between fast memory chips and your (relatively slow) hard disk. How much memory do you need?
The “Windows Vista Capable” and “Windows Vista Premium Ready” stickers that appear on some new hardware are based on standards expressed at the Windows Vista Enterprise Hardware Planning Guidance site. According to these standards, a system needs 512 MB to be “Windows Vista Capable” and at least 1 GB to be “Windows Vista Premium Ready.” You should consider “Windows Vista Capable” to mean adequate (if barely) for Windows Vista Home Basic. For the more feature rich editions of Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, and Ultimate treat the “Windows Vista Premium Ready” standards as a minimum. In any case, doubling these minimums will provide a better ride for most users.
You can gauge the adequacy of your computer’s physical memory by watching the Memory graph in the Resource Overview section of the Reliability and Performance Monitor (to open this tool, click the Start buttonPicture of the Start button , type perfmon, and then press ENTER). The blue line on the graph indicates the percentage of your physical memory that’s currently in use. If this line hovers in the sub arctic zone (say, north of 60 percent) most of the time under your typical working conditions, you might want to consider adding memory to your computer, particularly if you are also seeing the green line on the same graph, the line that indicates the number of hard faults per second your system is generating, spike off the top of the graph for extended periods of time. (A hard fault, which despite its name is not an error condition, is an instance where a block of memory needed by the operating system has to be fetched from the page file on the hard disk. A high number of hard faults per second indicates a large perhaps excessive reliance on virtual memory, with consequent adverse performance effects.)
Ensuring that you have an adequate virtual-memory configuration
Physical memory might be the vital lubricant of a happily humming Windows machine, but Windows is not designed to run on RAM chips alone, no matter how many of them you have. In addition to using physical RAM to store programs and data, Windows creates a hidden file on your primary hard disk and uses that file to swap pages of data out of physical memory when necessary. The “swap file” (these days more commonly called a page file) acts as an extension of main memory or, in other words, as virtual memory.
In a default installation, Windows creates the page file in the root folder on the same drive that holds the Windows system files. The size of the page file is determined by the amount of RAM in your system. By default, the minimum size is 1.5 times the amount of physical RAM, and the maximum size is three times the amount of RAM (twice the minimum). You can see the page file in a Windows Explorer window if you configure Windows to show hidden and system files; look for Pagefile.sys in the root of your system drive.
To see the current configuration of your system’s virtual memory, click the Start button, click Control Panel, click System and Maintenance, click Performance Information and Tools, click Advanced Tools (in the Tasks pane at the left side of the dialog box), and then click Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows. After answering the User Account Control prompt, you’ll arrive at the Performance Options dialog box. You’re nearly there; click the Advanced tab, and then click Change. The image below shows the Virtual Memory dialog box, with default settings for a machine with 2 GB of RAM (default, that is, except that we cleared the Automatically manage paging file size for all drives check box to make the rest of the dialog box easier to read).
By default, Windows creates a single page file in the root folder on the same volume that holds the Windows system files and manages its size for you. The Currently allocated number near the bottom of the dialog box shows you how large the file is now. If conditions on your system change (you run an unusually large assortment of memory-intensive applications, for example), Windows might expand the page file. It might then return the file to its original size (or a smaller size) if the demand subsides. All this happens without intervention or notification if you leave the Automatically manage paging file size for all drives check box selected.
If you don’t want Windows to do this for you, you have the following options:
- You can move the page file to a different volume, if you have more than one.
- If you have more than one volume, you can establish more than one page file.
- For any page file, you can choose between System managed size and Custom size.
- If you choose Custom size, you can specify an initial size and a maximum size.
You can remove a paging file from a volume by selecting the volume and choosing No paging file. (You can even get rid of all paging files this way, although doing so is not recommended, even on systems with a lot of RAM.)
Should you get involved in page-file management, and, if so, how?
If you have more than one physical disk, moving the page file to a fast drive that doesn’t contain your Windows system files is a good idea. Using multiple page files split over two or more physical disks is an even better idea, because your disk controller can process multiple requests to read or write data concurrently. Don’t make the mistake of creating two or more page files using multiple volumes on a single physical disk, however. If you have a single hard disk that contains C, D, and E volumes, for example, and you split the page file over two or more of these, you might actually make your computer run more slowly than before. In that configuration, the heads on the physical disk have to do more work, loading pages from different portions of the same disk sequentially, rather than loading data from a single contiguous region of the hard disk.
If you are short of hard disk space, you might consider setting a smaller initial page file size. You can use a handy script from Windows MVP Bill James to monitor current page file usage and session peak usage. This tool, a free download at BillsWay.com, was written for Windows XP but works fine in Windows Vista. If this script nearly always shows current and peak usage levels well below the current page file size, you might want to consider reducing the initial size to save disk space. On the other hand, if you’re not short of disk space, there’s nothing to be gained from doing this and you might occasionally overload your custom settings, thereby degrading the performance of your system.
Should you enlarge your page file? Most users won’t need to do this. But you might want to keep an eye on the green line in the Memory graph of Resource Overview, as described above in “Ensuring that you have adequate RAM.” If that line is spiking off the top of the graph a great deal of the time during your normal work, you might consider increasing the maximum size of your page file. (Disregard page file spikes and disk activity in general that takes place while you’re not actually working. This is likely to be the result of search indexing, defragmentation, or other background processes and does not indicate a problem with your actual work performance.)
NoteFor more information about page file management in Windows, we recommend the article “Virtual Memory in Windows XP” on the Windows Support Center website. Although the file magnitudes discussed in this article are pertinent to the Windows XP environment rather than to Windows Vista, the basic information about how Windows manages and uses page files is still useful and valid.
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Written by Jason on August 24th, 2008 with no comments.
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Learn how your hard drive and graphics card impact your system’s performance, and dig deep under the bonnet to discover and fix hardware issues.
In previous guides we have looked at improving your system’s performance by simply removing unwanted programs. The next area we want to understand is the impact your hard drive and graphics card have on your system.
Before we start examining your computer, we need to see what Windows Vista believes is possible from the system when it’s working at its best. Searching for ‘Performance’ in Start Search should lead you to the Performance Information and Tools analysis of your system. If any numbers are low, then you may wish to consider looking at these areas for replacement. My laptop has a lowest rating of 4.3, which is more than adequate, but should one number be low compared to the rest, I would consider replacing that element. If your computer is running low on RAM, for example, it will use the hard drive as an extension of memory, but this deals a fatal blow to your