Comments on: Internet Explorer Memory usage

By: scotty

scotty — Wed, 04 May 2005 04:18:34 +0000

Sometimes having a choice to have the new window running in the same or different processes is actually a “good thing”.

If you click on the Internet Explorer icon, it actually launches a new instance. Moreover, each IE instance manages its own pool of session cookies, which is *extremely* useful in web application development, where you might want to log into the same app as different users as the same time to test interactivity. You can’t easily do that with Firefox, as all windows share the same cookie jar. But with IE, as it gives you this option to create two windows as different instances with differnet cookie jar, that creates a whole lot of possibilities.

And of course, if you want to preserve memory, Ctrl-N will do.

By: Ryan Rahn

Ryan Rahn — Tue, 03 May 2005 17:35:02 +0000

Very interesting. Thanks for the info!

By: Glenn

Glenn — Tue, 03 May 2005 16:50:50 +0000

It would seem that Firefox always seems to spawn off the same process, so it doesn’t have the option. That is a good point though, if you’re doing stuff that could crash IE, opening different processes would be handy.

Of course *using* IE is something that can cause it to crash

By: Darren

Darren — Tue, 03 May 2005 16:46:54 +0000

That may not be such a bad thing. I have had cases where a site (usually associated with hacking) may cause a PC to either lockup or may open so many popups that it’s a losing battle to close them all. Killing the process in Task Manager kills the offending window along with all its popups. A new IE window started with the icon, however, will not be killed at this stage. From what you say, Firefox will not operate in this way. (I use Firefox, BTW. Tabs are too handy to go without…)

Oh, and it’s good to see World Community Grid running away happily there…

By: scotty

scotty — Tue, 03 May 2005 13:18:34 +0000