Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 may have memory handling advantages over Firefox

UPDATE 2 July 2006 7:30 pm CT

Redmond (WA) - Demonstrating that the entire world doesn’t have to be delayed on account of Microsoft Office 2007, the company’s Internet Explorer 7 team triumphantly plowed ahead with its Beta 3 release this morning. If the troubles we had with installing IE7 Beta 3 - after repeated uninstallations and Registry tweaks - is indicative of the problems others are having across North America, then maybe the bad news doesn’t stop here.

The revised Search list in IE7 Beta 3, which by default is set to Microsoft’s own search engine.

Once up and running, Beta 3 is a somewhat improved version, with welcome changes primarily in the RSS feed handling department. Some of its speed, which was clearly missing from the Beta 2 release, has now happily returned. When no default search provider has been entered into the search tool, IE7 now installs Windows Live (Default), though it clearly gives the user the option to change this default. Previous editions referred to MSN Search.

The new IE7 remains a small download, at least by modern standards, and certainly by Microsoft’s : under 13 MB, which over broadband connections still takes less than a minute. But the real conservation takes place with respect to the memory footprint ; and here, Microsoft’s familiarity with its own operating system pays off yet again. In our initial tests, when we loaded four of TG Publishing’s own front pages into memory, then checked memory consumption in Task Manager, both IE7 Beta 3 and Firefox 1.5.4 consumed about 64 MB of system memory, with Firefox slightly more than IE7. But when both programs were minimized, something almost magic happened : IE7 released most of its memory back to the system ; Firefox did not. In a minimized state, Firefox still consumed 57 MB of memory, while IE7 dropped to below 10 MB.

Upon restoration, Firefox stayed put at around 57 MB, but IE7 recalled page content only when necessary. As we clicked on tabs, IE7 gradually reclaimed more memory, but only expanded to a footprint below 31 MB, with the same four pages loaded as before.

UPDATE : Multiple readers wrote us to say there’s a way to configure Firefox to release memory back to the system while minimized. The secret is the about :config page, which contains Firefox’s configuration settings. You bring up this page by typing about :config into the address bar. Then right-click on the page itself, and from the popup menu, select New -> Boolean. In the New Preference Name dialog box, enter config.trim_on_minimize and click OK. Next, in the Enter Boolean value dialog box, choose True and click OK. Why this isn’t a default setting for Firefox was a mystery to several of those who wrote in.

Quick Tabs lets you preview thumbnails of all your open Web page tabs.

The Quick Tabs feature remains one of the more impressive additions to the program ; it premiered in Beta 2, and has grown quite handsome for Beta 3. The Quick Tabs is now represented in the leftmost tab in the tab row, rather than just a button in Beta 2. When you click here, you see thumbnails (fairly large ones, but miniatures nonetheless) of all your open windows. This way, you can browse your open tabs not just by title - in case you happen to forget what the title was you were looking for - but by content as well. And now, tabs can be repositioned in the tab row by sliding them left or right, like column headings in Excel or Windows Explorer...or like tabs in Firefox.

As members of Microsoft’s Team RSS blog , users who subcategorize the RSS feeds to which they subscribe in multiple folders now have the ability to refresh all of the feeds in a folder in one fell swoop, with a right-click menu command. And if you’re in the middle of reading a feed and you know that, when you click away from the feed, IE7 will mark it as read even if you haven’t finished reading it yet, there’s now a checkmark control in the upper right corner of the feed that you can uncheck, to help you remember to come back to the unread feed later.

In one more attempt to catch up with the buzz Firefox generates for itself in the developer community, IE7 now elevates the role of add-ons, or program extensions the user can download for customization purposes. The Tools menu now includes a command that takes the user to Microsoft’s Web page for selecting and downloading add-ons. There aren’t too many there yet, because the buzz hasn’t quite caught on.

Installing IE7 Beta 3 was a bear, failing for most of the day on all of our test systems, before Registry Tweaks finally enabled an installation on one system late in the day. Of course, prior betas must be completely uninstalled prior to trying to load Beta 3 ; but in our case, the only system that would accept Beta 3 was one that never had an IE7 beta installed on it before ; it had been running IE6. If you’re not typically one of the earliest adopters of a new product, you might want to wait just a few days to give Microsoft an opportunity to address possible issues with the IE7 installer.

You can now leave an RSS feed in mid-read without IE7 thinking you’ve read it all. Just uncheck this mark.

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