Microsoft vows to learn from its mistakes
Microsoft has announced that it will be concentrating on fixing the performance issues that plagued the Windows client OS and Internet Explorer (IE) browser in the next versions of those products.
While performance is made up of "many elements", the Windows 7 team is focusing on six areas of improvement in Windows 7, according to the post. They are memory usage, Central Processing Unit (CPU) utilisation, disk I/O, the boot-shutdown-standby-resume feature, the base system and disk footprint.
CPU utilisation in particular is a problem in Vista, and could use improvement in Windows 7. Cherry said he runs a 32-bit version of Vista on a PC with a 64-bit processor and 2GB of RAM. However, when he starts his Outlook email client, it uses 100 percent of his CPU resources for more than a minute and a half. "It blows me away," he said of the problem.
Indeed, Microsoft said a key engineering goal for Windows 7 is to "keep the CPU utilisation low as that improves multi-user scenarios as well as reduces power consumption," according to the Windows 7 blog post.
The focus of IE 8 improvements, according to the IEblog post, will be how to make pages and images load faster for 'everyday' browsing. This will require improvements to scripting, the rendering engine and networking improvements, among others, the company said.
Microsoft has said it expects to release Windows in early 2010; however, the company has not provided a time frame for the final release of IE8, though it is safe to say it likely will be a part of the Windows 7 release. Microsoft released IE8 beta 2 on Wednesday this week.
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Comments
Dave said: Same here IE8 2 has been supremely stable actually I think Microsoft have a very good product here
Sam said: I completely disagree with you Mike IE8 beta 2 is competely stable and has never crashed for me The new features are great like inprivate searching enhanced search and URL suggestions The accelerators are useful too IE6 was terrible and turned me off to IE I never used IE7 and went right to firefox and then later a windows version of safari I must IE8 beta is extremely useful and starts up quicker than firefox and safari
Mike said: I am not surprised Microsoft are worried The new IE8 beta just keeps crashing I know it is a beta version but if this is as close to the real thing then Microsoft are going backwards Mozilla here I come