14 DAY TRIAL // There is no doubt that Internet Explorer 8 is far superior to its precursor IE7. In a variety of aspects, from modern web standards support to security features and to performance, IE8 users will be able to easily feel the difference after they upgrade to the latest iteration of Internet Explorer. Especially when it comes down to a critical area of the user experience: reliability, with features such as Loosely-Coupled IE and Automatic Crash Recovery. The evolution from IE7 to IE8 has kicked up a notch the browser's reliability with Microsoft confirming the enhancements introduced via Stress Testing and Long Haul Testing. In this regard, Herman Ng, IE program manager, indicated that IE8 used consistently less memory compared to IE7 during day-long testing sessions, and could take stress tests for over half a day continuously.
“We are able to quantify these improvements using various tests and analyses, and compare our results to IE7. For example, we are now able to run stress tests continuously for over 12 hours on IE8, compared to less than 8 hours on IE7. Also, we found that IE8 uses up 90% less memory than IE7 after running continuously for 24 hours under Long Haul testing,” Herman stated. “We’re convinced that our approaches to identifying reliability issues have generated significant stability improvements to IE8.”
In addition to Long Haul Testing and Stress Testing, Microsoft also used automatic feedback provided by end-users in order to ensure a high reliability for Internet Explorer 8. The software giant was little shy of turning to the input available through the Windows Error Reporting in order to investigate and then resolve crashes and hangs.
Lab Reliability Testing undoubtedly played a key role in identifying issues with IE8. “Stress testing the browser is critical to identifying architectural bugs and other hidden issues. Our goal is to be able to stress-test IE8 for a defined period of time without interruptions. To measure this, we rapidly navigate to websites and perform user actions such as opening and closing tabs and windows. We hope to identify important issues that may not be seen from regular browsing behavior. Over the course of a day, it’s possible for our stress tests to navigate the same browser instance to over 100,000 web pages!” Herman explained.
At the same time, Microsoft dogfooded IE8 just as any other of its products. By eating its own dog food, namely, using its software internally, the Redmond company was capable of debugging IE8 crashes and hangs sometimes right on users’ machines. Of course, as a part of reliability testing, the Microsoft employees that are building specific features of the browser are also responsible for running automation on the feature in order to detect reliability problems.
“Long Haul Testing - Part of our vision for IE8 reliability is to allow users to run IE for as long as they desire without interruptions. We devise different types of tests to simulate long term usage of the browser and measure how long the tests can run before experiencing a crash or running out of memory. We then engage with teams to get the top issues fixed as soon as possible. We also run tests to track memory consumption after long periods of usage,” Herman said.
Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RTW is available for download here (for 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008).