This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read - Winston Churchill
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IE8 is a resource hog
INTERNET EXPLODER 8 is a seriously bloated and resource-hogging mess of software, according to an independent performance evaluation done by exo.performance.network.
The tests were run over several days under both Windows XP (SP3) and Vista x86 (SP1). What exo.performance.network discovered was "another example of unchecked Microsoft code 'bloat,' complete with 'shirt-bursting, waistline-stretching' memory consumption and the kind of CPU-hogging thread growth normally reserved for massively parallel server farms."
In a multi-tab browsing session against 10 websites under Vista, IE8 grabbed about 380MB of memory, in contrast with 250MB consumed by IE7 and just 159MB by Firefox 3.0.1. That makes IE8 nearly one and-a-half times more memory intensive than IE7 and well more than twice as greedy as Firefox.
With regard to the number of threads spawned by the browsers, IE8 created approaching three times the workload of IE7 and more than five times that of Firefox. IE8 spawned a staggering 171 concurrent threads, while IE7 spawned a somewhat less resource-hogging 65 threads and Firefox somehow managed to make do with spawning merely 29 threads.
Nonetheless, Firefox displayed websites faster than both IE7 and IE8, according to the test report, although it didn't present any timing figures. The test report conjectured that Firefox uses "a more efficient rendering engine employing fewer threads in exchange for faster linear performance."
And it appears that IE8 has such an overly complex design that it has trouble getting out of its own way to actually use the CPU resources available, though running under Vista imposed significant CPU overhead too. IE8 used average CPU time of 22 per cent when running under Windows XP and 33 per cent under Vista. IE7 used 13 per cent CPU under Windows XP and 24 per cent under Vista. Firefox made the best use of the available CPU resources, consuming 33 per cent CPU under Windows XP and 48 per cent under Vista.
The report observes that, "By delivering superior performance while maintaining a nearly [two times] smaller memory and CPU [threads] footprint across the board, Firefox 3.01 proves once again that the open source community can often trump even the most well-funded commercial projects when it comes to delivering efficient, streamlined code."
It has been said that "What Intel and AMD giveth, Microsoft taketh away." It appears that this will become even more true when the Vole imposes IE8 on its unsuspecting wibblers.
The test report speculated that Microsoft hopes that IE8 will drive customers into further hardware replacements to acquire systems with more than 4GB of memory running 64-bit flavours of Windows. That makes sense, because it will force buyers to also buy the Vole's next iteration of Windows as well, what our Charlie D has termed Windows ME II SP1a.
It also observed that, with its proliferation of threads and multiple execution processes – six discrete instances of iexplore.exe in the tests – IE8 is being positioned by Microsoft to take advantage of more CPU cores in future Intel and AMD chip designs. But it added that this positioning comes "at the cost of overwhelming today's single and dual-core PCs."
If the earlier versions of Windows ran like "a pig on Qualudes," to quote Eric Raymond, when the already bloated and slow Windows Vista gets loaded down with IE8 on the PC systems most people have now, it'll likely run like a half-ton hog overdosed on heroin. µ
See Also
IE8
privacy feature fails to live up to billing
Microsoft
releases IE8 beta 2
Porn
mode coming for IE8
Slipstreaming
comes to Microsoft's IE8
IE
beta unleashed
L'Inq
Infoworld
Tags: Microsoft
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Sheesh, Louise, what else is new?

Just issue the standard Microsoft software analysis:

{Microsoft software name here}
is a seriously bloated and resource-hogging mess of software.

I don't know what tools MS uses to write their software, but they should ask for their money back. What's that, you say, they use their own internally developed tools? Well, what do you expect then? Using bloated, resource-hogging software tools can only create bloated, resource-hogging software.

Microsoft software sucks AND blows. Period. End of story.
I swear The INQ praised Google Chrome for using multiple processes rather than just one, yet here you quote that multiple processes are bad because they overwhelm current cpu's! 

PS: I'm running Chrome Beta and just noticed that "Google" isn't in the dictionary. Sorry, that has possibly made my day...
FF3 and Chrome are really showing the IE team up for the programming charlatans they are. IE needs to stop taking itself so seriously and caring about the past. Get skinny, get standardised, get open and help everyone move forward MS.
There's nothing new about MS software grabbing that memory like a horse in a roadeo competition. Todays PC's are starting to become Dual Core standard in Comet 2 weeks ago all the PC's and Laptops I saw where Dual Core and about 2-3 Quad Core (Only 3 of the whole lot of PC's where AMD).

Also they have around 2GB memory standard it's cheap unbranded memory but 2GB is better than the old 256/512mb days. Plus they now have deadicated graphics cards there low end 8*** series from nVidia and 3**** series from ATi most of them where I saw. So Microsoft know this shouldn't be a problem it wouldn't to the adverage consumer they wouldn't know or even care.

Right now IE7 under my XP Pro SP3 for 1 tab is using 70mb for my 2GB system thats nothing.

But they would only know if they complained about it been slow and them getting someone round who knows about PC's but on adverage if it works and runs fine it won't matter people will still upgrade to it. With VISTA my brother has a AMD Phenom 9550, 2GB DDR2 RAM, 250GB SATA HDD and last night it gave me the not responding when reading data off a data DVD-RW I created. For that spec I shouldn't be even seeing that circle thing e.g hour glass.
maybe it is unoptimised beta code....
Two articles almost beside each other - IE8 is bloated and slow, but Google Chrome is innovative.
Umm. The Google design has nearly the same feature set as IE8 and (at least on my system) runs about the same speed and takes similar amounts of RAM. The opening screen looks pretty familiar too...

My suggestion; do the reviews again but this time swap authors and compare.
MS products get fatter and slower every time, their size is all that's saving them.

If they were forced to include choices for Internet Browsers, Office, Media Players etc in their operating system then they would be in trouble.

And with a Free Windows almost ready for general release the future for MS is looking tough.

Free Windows is called Reactos and it's available at www.reactos.org. They explain it better than me so here are there words:

"ReactOS® is a free, modern operating system based on the design of Windows® XP/2003. Written completely from scratch, it aims to follow the Windows® architecture designed by Microsoft from the hardware level right through to the application level. This is not a Linux based system, and shares none of the unix architecture. 

The main goal of the ReactOS project is to provide an operating system which is binary compatible with Windows. This will allow your Windows applications and drivers to run as they would on your Windows system. Additionally, the look and feel of the Windows operating system is used, such that people accustomed to the familiar user interface of Windows® would find using ReactOS straightforward. The ultimate goal of ReactOS is to allow you to remove Windows® and install ReactOS without the end user noticing the change.

Please bear in mind that ReactOS 0.3.6 is still in alpha stage, meaning it is not feature-complete and is not recommended for everyday use."
um, isn't IE8 still in beta? and isn't beta code normally known for being bloated and inefficient?
I know I see more than one iexplore.exe open now while using IE8 when this didn't happen on IE7 unless I had more than one copy open. I'm guessing this is something to do with the restore session thing. I also noticed yesterday the browser was so bloated (over 100mb) it was just unusable (my machine had 1.5gb ram). I think people like this auther should remember IE8 is still only a beta though and a 2 at that!. All in all I think it's coming along well.....
... did anybody truly not see this coming?
I think this shows an example of biased reporting. 

I rather agree with the article here: http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/09/02/google-chrome-highlights-mozilla-failure

I've seen firefox take up more memory than Internet Explorer countless times.

However still Safari surprises me with the fastest rendering and lowest memory foot print... Defintatley the browser of choice.
I thought that Microsoft had said a while ago that because its a beta they still had all of the debugging stuff in when they compiled it. And that it would make it a tiny bit larger and a little slower than it should be. if thats not the case at least its still a beta and they have not forced a not quite ready program upon the auto-update masses yet.
to be honest chrome can half some freakish high cpu burts with all the tab processes always make my laptop fan spin up :) thats why i noticed it
Not until IE7 absolutely won't run anything. Meanwhile, AOL Desktop takes care of any IE use I may need and Firefox takes care of the rest. Chrome may beat them all, eventually.
Whilst the main thrust of the article seems more-or-less on the button, I want to point out one inaccuracy. The number of threads "spun" out of an application has no great bearing on performance or resources.

It's normal practice to create "thread parks", where a potentially large number of threads are created and parked, awaiting work to do and sleeping in the meantime. Each thread uses up little memory, and no CPU, until it's woken up and made to perform a task. A common application of this is in messaging. Every time a message comes in, a random thread is woken, given the message to carry, and dispatches it to its destination, whereupon it goes back to sleep in the thread park. You do get a lot of that in browsers, so it's reasonable for a browser to have a high thread count, even if it's not doing much.
Two colleagues have identical laptops, with one running XP and the other running Vista. The XP machine last 6 hours on a full charge, the Vista one 1.5 hours. Is this Microsoft's contribution to green computing?
Well, it's still in beta so hopefully we can shame MS into improving IE8's performance.

What I question is the assertion that FireFox is "faster." In my experience FF take a few extra seconds to start up and complex pages seem to need an extra second or two in order to render the entire page. On a fast PC it's barely noticable but it stands out on some of my older laptops.

So what exactly is faster and am I missing something in FF that will speed it up? IE is wired into Windows so it seems to me that it will always have a speed advantage...
Also, IE7 is faster than browsers in most things ... lols

http://anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3398&p=4
"IE8 grabbed about 380MB of memory, in contrast with 250MB consumed by IE7 and just 159MB by Firefox 3.0.1. That makes IE8 nearly one and-a-half times more memory intensive than IE7..."

No, it's not almost 150% more memory intensive as IE7. It is almost 50% MORE memory intensive, making it 150% AS memory intensive.

150% MORE suggests it is a total of 250% AS memory intensive, which would be in the 600s.
IE 8b2 is my 5th favorite browser!
I'm glad that IE8 is finally able to take advantage of my 100 core PC. It has 25 quad-core CPUs, and I need more threads. The old browsers just don't spawn enough of them.
Run the 10 sites they mention and you will see that it uses nowhere near 830MB
That is one of the most untruthfull "reviews" I have ever read. 

With the 10 sites they list I get topped out at 134,724k that is a whole lot less than the 830MB they claim
I have to say the article is bogus. What about Opera?, IE8 sucks but opera consume much less memory than Firefox.
Hey wait, so are multiple threads for your browser good or bad? I thought you just told me that chrome with multiple threads was the best things since sliced ham.... And what about Java? Who cares how fast it is if it doesnt work, there are several pages that i have to use for work that just dont work on firefox/opera/chrome and probably never will work, whats up with that?

I like innovation, but so far i havent seen any. A new start page.....wow that really doesnt help me that much, i start firefox with my favorites already open. When something new and really useful shows up, lemme know.

PS

I love open source/addons and the such for firefox, and i use firefox 80% of the time. But decide what you like as by the feature set and function, not by the color of the company's logo who designed it.
...what kind of browsing session across ten websites can result in a browser requiring hundreds of megabytes of RAM? I mean, where are these ten web pages that between them add up to that much data? Answer? They don't add up to that much. I think that there's something badly wrong with all browsers in general if the best of them needs 159MB for just ten tabs. If you don't get 159MB of data coming down the wire, then how can that legitamately be turned in 159MB by the browser?
This seems to be common with all MS IE betas - they all tend to suck up memory like a rampant hoover... and MS always seem to change this somewhere in the RC cycle.
I wonder what kind of sites people are using for benchmarking, because there are conflicting reports. For example CNN's review put IE8 on top compared to FF or Chrome in terms of CPU usage (or lack thereof).

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/ptech/09/03/review.chrome.ap/index.html
Only chrome, which is very simple & structurlly stronger than Most Small browsers, is mentioned as Beta. IE is Already Beta2, Much, Much Bigger & ReALLY Cool, except for what it does to your Core. Temp only, while it runs. Its it can really slice up some text. Chrome Beta seems Hard & Linear, More Lock Step, Due to simplicty in Fewer Modules.

REally, ReALly, COOL Browser is from AT&T AT: www.Pogo.com its application to make sure your system fits, yet Power Droowls Form Monsters Depth of options. All Pretty Good in This Round.NEW Ones Being Better than overpublicizded opera or even firefox, which has improved as merges in: SEAMONKY, Also recomended Beta.
Thomas Stewart von Drashek M.D.

Health of Browser issue. NONE.
Drashek
@paulbag

Please, you're comparing apple to orange. Browser that is meant single process (IE & Firefox) can't be compared to multi processes browser (Chrome).
For IE/Fire fox, more threads means additional cpu power to render webpage. To Chrome, more processes means stability.

Anyway, try comparing IE & chrome opened side by side, browse the same webpage. See which is faster

BTW, google not in dictionary?
You sure about it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_(verb)
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060706-7198.html
http://news.cnet.com/Google-joins-Xerox-as-a-verb/2100-1025_3-6091289.html
http://www.google.com.sg/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLD_enSG291&q=google+verb&btnG=Search&meta=

Try harder please...
@paulbag

Please, you're comparing apple to orange. Browser that is meant single process (IE & Firefox) can't be compared to multi processes browser (Chrome).
For IE/Fire fox, more threads means additional cpu power to render webpage. To Chrome, more processes means stability.

Anyway, try comparing IE & chrome opened side by side, browse the same webpage. See which is faster

BTW, google not in dictionary?
You sure about it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_(verb)
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060706-7198.html
http://news.cnet.com/Google-joins-Xerox-as-a-verb/2100-1025_3-6091289.html
http://www.google.com.sg/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLD_enSG291&q=google+verb&btnG=Search&meta=

Try harder please...
May be trading increase in RAM use for aditional features and caching of pages and rendered output.
Beta software often has a lot of breakpoints, debug checks and general bloat. This extra code is removed prior to the final release candidate. Other optimisations are also performed that can reduce memory requirements or increase execution speed.
I don't expect the final IE8 RAM usage to be less than IE7 or <70% of current IE8 usage but who knows ?
After years of using FF i've finally deleted every FF trace from my computers. FF is crashing constanly, eating my memory, leaving orphane processes all the time. Sadly, FF is easily the worst browser around. I'm still keeping FF2 and FF3 vesrions running on a XP VM for testing puropses but that is. IE8, even in its RC state is way better in every aspect. And Chrome... well, it is a joke atm.
I need to run certain websites as different login accounts but IE8 has "fixed" this for me. No more ability to launch IE from runas - it just silently fails. Thanks MS for your support of LUA.