Microsoft Kills New IE8 Windows 7 RC Functionality

After just one day since Windows 7 Release Candidate delivered new functionality for Internet Explorer 8 Build 7100, Microsoft is killing it off. IE8 continues to evolve past the RTW stage for previous versions of Windows, as the browser is an integral component of Windows 7. With the RC Build 7100, the Redmond company also advanced Internet Explorer with new reliability functionality related to how the browser handled delayed responsive (hanging) tabs or non-responsiveness (hard hanging) tabs. The new IE8 capabilities were introduced on May 4 concomitantly with the early availability of Windows 7 RC, and cut off on May 5 via a series of updates released by the software giant.

“The IE8 in Windows 7 RC includes additional tab “hang” reporting functionality. This functionality relies on a timer threshold to determine when a tab might be unresponsive. This threshold was calibrated based on data from internal Microsoft users,” revealed a member of the IE Team. “As we began to look at data coming in from real-world Win7 RC users, we noticed that some users are being prompted to recover from hung tabs more frequently than some would like. We stated on Monday that if the data suggests that too many users are being prompted too frequently that we would publish an update to resolve the issue.”

Windows 7 RC users receiving the following error message in IE8 "A webpage is not responding" should install the KB970858 updates – links at the bottom of this article. It appears that the IE8 Build 7100 functionality designed to deal with unresponsive websites is not performing under optimal conditions in real-life scenarios. Microsoft explained that issues with frequent error messages being displayed to the end users were associated with situations in which computers ran under high load conditions, or on low-performance machines, as the time-out value was exceeded fast.

“Based on the data we’ve seen so far, today we are publishing an update that turns off the additional tab hang reporting in Win7,” the IE team representative added. “The upside here is that we now have a wealth of data about the real issues that users encounter every day, and we are going to continue to work hard to address responsiveness issues up until and after Win7 RTM.”

There is also a way to tweak the functionality in IE8 running on Windows 7 RC. Microsoft explained that users would need to add a DWORD registry value labeled HangResistance (value 0) to the registry subkeys: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN and
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN.

- Update for Internet Explorer 8 for Windows 7 Release Candidate (KB970858)
- Update for Internet Explorer 8 for Windows 7 Release Candidate for x64-based Systems (KB970858)

- Update for Internet Explorer 8 for Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate R2 Release Candidate x64 Edition (KB970858)
- Update for Internet Explorer 8 for Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate for Itanium-based Systems (KB970858)

32-bit and 64-bit Windows 7 (Release Candidate) RC Build 7100.0.090421-1700 is available for download here.
Windows Server 2008 R2 Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.