The Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 2 caught my eye today. Since I’ve found that IE 9 is a significant improvement on IE 8 for those machines that have the hardware to run it properly, I was curious to see what was new in IE 10.
While there are some page layout features that are going to make life much easier for webmasters, the things that interested me most were the Web Workers and Page Visibility components.
The Web Workers feature breaks off CPU intensive JavaScript code and runs it separately in the background so as to avoid hanging the page itself and to allow the JavaScript to run multi-threaded and so make use of the power of multi-core processors.
I like Page Visibility even more for my own special reasons. For the first time the browser can keep track of whether you can actually see a given page and so the pages can be coded so they don’t waste computing power being active when you’re not actually looking at them. When the browser window is minimized the page knows that it is hidden and can take a breather. Hopefully this is true when you select another tab in the same window. I expect so but I can’t test it because the Platform Preview only displays one page.
Why am I so interested in Page Visibility? My last computer had a Pentium 4 1.8 GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM. Fielding tech support calls from various clients in a day, I found myself opening an increasing number of windows and tabs in Firefox. I’d open at least one window per client and 5 to 15 tabs and then leave them open until I had time to bookmark the best pages. This brought my system to its knees. I added an extra gigabyte of RAM and that helped some but all those tabs would run up my CPU usage towards 100% as all those pages animated or updated or whatever they were doing in the background.
My current computer has a quad-core 2.8 GHz processor and 8 GB of RAM and so far handles my web abuse quite well. However, given my recent personal best 32 windows including 286 tabs, the overall CPU usage often exceeds 50, 60 and sometimes 70%. My system is still quite responsive but it sucks power and spits out heat. In the summer without air conditioning I can feel it warm up the room.
With Page Visibility I could keep open an insane number of tabs and have them resting comfortably when I’m not looking at them. And that will keep me resting (read “slaving away) comfortably as well.
If you are intereted in reading more about IE 10 PP 2 here are a couple of reviews I found interesting:
Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 2 shows strong progress
Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 2 is to die for
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