14 DAY TRIAL // One aspect of Windows Vista that is indisputable is the operating system's stability. But the consistent level of reliability in Vista failed to rub off on the Internet Explorer 7 default component. Having to deal with faulty add-ons and plug-ins (the most problematic of which is Adobe Flash), IE7, in turn, managed to deliver a rather poor reliability experience compared to the latest Windows platform. This scenario was augmented by Microsoft's failure to include with the browser any sort of mitigation designed to effectively deal with errors and crashes.
"For Internet Explorer, reliability means that the browser should always start quickly, perform well, connect to the Internet, and show Web sites without crashing or hanging. Most users want their browser to work, recover smoothly after a crash, and display the Web correctly. Users are not as concerned with what causes the problem, whether that be a poorly functioning add-on or poorly performing website. As part of our ongoing commitment to improve reliability, we have done a great deal of work in IE8 to make the browser more robust in all of these areas: performance, recovery and display," stated Andy Zeigler, Program Manager Reliability and Privacy.
Internet Explorer 8 will deliver, starting with the second Beta build, planned for August 2008, two critical features when it comes down to ensuring reliability: Loosely-Coupled IE and Automatic Crash Recovery. Both could have made the life of IE7 users much easier, but Microsoft is betting on "better late than never" with the introduction of the two items into IE8. However, the availability of the two features only in IE8 will continue to preserve and perpetuate the perception that Microsoft is still playing catch-up to rival products, especially the open source Firefox browser from Mozilla.
Loosely-Coupled IE is the foundation for IE8 Automatic Crash Recovery, and a feature which ensures that the browser is handled as a sum of its active components, with the tabs virtually isolated from the frames. Thanks to this architectural attribute, a crash caused by a website opened in a tab will not kill the entire browser process, but only that specific problem-area. IE8 Beta 2 will deliver Frame Process Merging, additional tab processes and virtual tabs.
"Automatic Crash Recovery: in the event of a crash, Automatic Crash Recovery is designed to get you back to browsing as quickly as possible. It uses LCIE's tab isolation to help localize the failure to your tab," Zeigler added. "When you crash, we tear down the old tab process, create a new tab process and recover the stored data back into the tab. For many website this works well; however, there are other websites, such as sites with web forms, or sites that you need to login to, that we didn't recover successfully," he continued revealing that with Beta 2 IE8 would be capable of recovering login information via session cookies and form data.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is available for download here.