Microsoft's latest version of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) requires more than double the system memory of its main rival, Mozilla's Firefox, and spawns nearly six times the number of processor threads, a performance researcher said today.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) Beta 2 also consumes 52 percent more memory than its predecessor, IE7, and uses almost three times as many threads, said Craig Barth, chief technology officer at Devil Mountain Software, a Florida-based maker of PC performance testing software.

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"IE8 is epically porcine," said Barth. "Microsoft has gone to epic levels of bloat."

Barth tested IE8 Beta 2, IE7, and Firefox 3.0.1 in a 10-site scenario that involved media-rich domains such as boston.com, channel9.com, cnet.com, infoworld.com, nytimes.com, and others. Each site was opened by each browser in a separate tab, then links on those sites were opened in new tabs. Both Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight were installed as plug-ins for each browser.

By test end, IE8 Beta 2 had grabbed 380MB of memory on the 2GB-equipped system running Windows Vista, while IE7 accounted for 250GB and Firefox 3.0.1, the most-recent version of the open source browser, had taken 159MB. When the same tests were run under Windows XP, each browser consumed slightly less memory than in Vista; IE8 Beta 2, however, continued to lead the competition by wide margins.

"When Windows XP starts, the entire OS takes 130 to 150MB," said Barth. "Suddenly you're looking at a memory footprint for IE that's bigger than Microsoft's earlier operating system. IE8 is fatter than XP."

When Barth tallied up the separate processor threads each browser spawned during the tests, he also found that IE8 Beta 2's count was dramatically higher than either IE7's or Firefox's. The latter, for instance, never used more than 29 concurrent processor threads during the 10-site test, while IE7 spawned a maximum of 65. IE8 Beta 2, however, used a whopping 171 threads.

Piling on the threads, said Barth, "becomes overwhelming after a while" and can have a direct impact on the speed of the browser. The more concurrent threads, the more operating system overhead managing those threads, and the more the processor is stressed. Web browsers typically uses multiple processor threads, but when the thread count climbs, performance can suffer unless the application is running on a multiple-core processor.

That may be Microsoft's plan, Barth speculated. "If a multithreaded application is designed well, and runs on a heavily parallel system, like a multicore machine with four or eight [processor] cores, you can get additional performance. My guess is that Microsoft is targeting IE8 at the next generation of hardware."

While that may be good news for users with multicore machines, what about people running older hardware? "On legacy systems with just one core, IE8's going to struggle," Barth answered.

He likened IE8's penchant for spawning a large number of threads with Windows Vista's similar habit. Vista, said Barth, uses over 90 at startup, while the older Windows XP spawns less than 60. "No matter how much you strip out [Vista], you still have more threads than in XP," he said. "My theory is that's why Vista is 40 percent slower than XP, no matter how much you take out of Vista."

Last year, Barth used Devil Mountain's DMS Clarity Studio performance-analyzing software to make several performance claims about Windows XP and Windows Vista, including that Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) was no faster than the stock version.

The one bright spot for IE8 in the Devil Mountain tests was its CPU utilization. On average, Firefox consumed 33 percent of the CPU's time under XP, and 48 percent under Vista. Meanwhile, IE8 Beta 2 took 22 percent of the CPU in XP, 33 percent under Vista. IE7 was the least aggressive at utilizing the processor: its averages were 13 percent and 24 percent under XP and Vista, respectively.

Barth attributed Firefox's heftier CPU time consumption to a "more efficient rendering engine" that employs fewer threads but aggressively pushes the processor to gain faster performance.

"Microsoft has taken the attitude that hardware is cheap, like it did when Vista first came out," Barth said. That may play out better for users down the road, he added, but he wondered if it is the right move for the present.

He also defended testing IE8, even though it is only in beta form. "Absolutely, it's fair to test now," he said. "I'm sure they'll do some performance optimization, but I don't see that much debug code here. And unless they do something drastic to the architecture, I think this is the kind of performance we'll see in the final."

Microsoft has said that IE8 Beta 2 is "feature complete," which means it doesn't plan on adding any additional features to the browser. It has, however, refused to set a timetable to shipping the major upgrade, and officially has only been willing to say it will launch before the next version of Windows.

For its part, Microsoft has touched on some performance improvements it's made in IE8. In a blog entry posted last Tuesday, for example, Christian Stockwell, a program manager on the IE team, said company developers fixed more than 400 memory leaks in the browser that reduced, not increased, the amount of memory used by the beta.

He also echoed concepts raised the day before by another Microsoft manager, James Pratt, during an interview with Computerworld prior to Beta 2's release. Both men dismissed the focus by rivals, including Mozilla, on major speed gains in JavaScript execution, as missing the big picture. "Performance is also about how quickly I can get things done," said Pratt. "We've made improvements in the [IE] JavaScript engine, but we're really focusing on both areas, performance and productivity."

Stockwell, for instance, cited WebSlices, IE8's new data feed feature, as a major productivity boon, and thus a performance win for Microsoft's browser. "In some cases the fastest browser is the one that does not need to load a page at all," he argued.

Barth remained skeptical. "Firefox is rendering pages faster, by most measurements, and doing it with half the memory. It has way less code bloat. But IE8, this is fat."

Devil Mountain also operates Exo.performance.net (Xpnet), a community-based collection network that gathers performance and other metric data from more than 3,000 PCs. Users can join the network by downloading and installing a small utility, DMS Clarity Tracker Agent, from Devil Mountain's site.

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After weeks of speculation, it appears that the general public will soon be able to get its hands on the first beta of Microsoft's follow-up to Windows Vista. A message on the MDC (MSDN Developer Conference) site states that all attendees of the upcoming MDC events, a series of Microsoft-sponsored road shows running from early December through mid-February, will receive a Windows 7 Beta 1 DVD in the mail "when they become available."

Microsoft isn't giving an exact delivery date for the Windows 7 beta, but some reports speculate the disc will be ready before January 13.

[ InfoWorld's Randall C. Kennedy and OSNews' Thom Holwerda debated the best way to assess Windows 7's changes ]

Some bloggers, the few who've actually tested the pre-beta code, have voiced concerns about the Windows 7 feature set. Infoworld's Randall C. Kennedy, for instance, recently declared that Windows 7 was essentially a slightly tweaked version of Vista. Other reports have praised-with some reservations-Windows 7's interface improvements, such as a vastly remodeled Windows Taskbar.

Microsoft has indicated that Windows 7 will likely be ready by late 2009 or early 2010, and given the lack of spectacular new features in Vista's replacement, there's no reason to think that Redmond won't meet that timeline. Certainly, the average Vista user would be thrilled if the hated User Account Control security feature would simply go away. Early indications are that it won't, but UAC will undergo some major changes in Windows 7.

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IT vendors may be growing increasingly desperate amid the global economic downturn, but customers must employ a range of tactics -- not just bullying -- to extract cost savings from them, a group of Forrester Research analysts said during a client teleconference Wednesday.

Companies simply can't use a shotgun-style approach and expect to succeed, said software licensing analyst Duncan Jones: "Anything that is undifferentiated, like a general letter that goes out [to vendors] saying we've got to cut everyone's maintenance by 10 percent? That's not going anywhere."

[ For more on how to deal with the recession, check out InfoWorld's special report: IT and the financial crisis. ]

Analyst Paul Roehrig, who focuses on outsourcing and IT services, said it is difficult and awkward to extract price concessions on a signed contract.

"Either you're begging or threatening.... Those [tactics] tend to work, but only for a short time," he said, adding, "unless you're really overpaying, there's really not that much room in the provider's margin where they can lower the price point without changing the service level."

And if a customer does succeed in lowering its services costs, "the vendor is going to immediately substitute junior people," said analyst John McCarthy, whose coverage areas include offshoring.

Instead of begging for a rate cut, customers could instead ask their vendors to assign more seasoned workers to their projects, resulting in productivity gains and cost savings, McCarthy said.

Meanwhile, the tactics are different for software licenses and maintenance agreements, according to Jones.

"One of the problems is, you're dealing with a software rep who has different goals than you. He needs to sell new licenses and has no interest in helping you cut costs," he said. "But if you get up higher in the organization, there are going to be people who care more about the long-term relationship, and there's flexibility there."

That said, now is the time to push for bigger discounts on new licenses, as sales representatives "are desperate to meet their number by end of the year," Jones added.

Companies could even indicate they'd be happy to let any outstanding deals float over into 2009, he said: "That will probably be too late for the rep, so try it as a tactic and see how much flexibility you've got."

Also, customers could use money they're prepared to spend on new software as leverage, Jones said: "Anything you're trying to get, like cutting maintenance on products you're not using, you might be able to get that as a quid pro quo for spending in another area."

Beyond maximizing their buying power, companies should save money by determining which software assets no longer need a maintenance contract, Jones said: "You save costs with minimal impact on the business, but you put pressure on other vendors because it shows you're seriously looking at everything."

A similar approach should be taken to IT services contracts, Roehrig said. "If you're asking for the highest levels of service, you're going to be paying top dollar, when the reality is that the enterprise can function just fine with not everyone having gold-plated service."

Companies should also try to get more value out of outsourcing in general through strategic hiring, he said. "If I had money as a client to invest in one thing ... I would get someone who really knows how to manage a service provider. Some of the best outsourcing deals I've come up against have really good people who know how to get a service provider to do what you want."

Customers should also seek to lower the total number of service providers they contract with, leading the way to bigger volume discounts, Roehrig said. But he noted that this can be difficult for heavily federated organizations to accomplish.

It's also possible to save money by actually helping one's vendor cut costs, according to Jones.

If four divisions within a company are negotiating separately with a vendor, they should consider consolidating those relationships, he said: "I would go to the vendor and say, how can I earn cost reductions by dealing with you in a centralized fashion?"

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled a free plug-in for Firefox to translate Open XML documents, an update to its document translator, and a toolkit for Java developers that was built under the umbrella of its Document Interoperability Initiative.

The group released the OpenXML Document Viewer as an open source project on its Codeplex Web site. The viewer translates documents in the Open XML format, which became an ISO standard in April after much contentious debate , to HTML so they can be viewed on a browser. The viewer, which is still in the preview stage, eliminates the need for a user to install Microsoft Office or any other productivity tool set.

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The first implementation developed by MindTree and Microsoft works with Firefox 3.0 running on Windows or Linux and translates font types, images, text styles, diagrams, tables, and hyperlinks. In early to mid-2009, the project will add support for Opera and add server-side features.

The software was released during a Document Interoperability Initiative (DII) meeting this week in Belgium.

Microsoft created DII in March with the help of Novell, Mark Logic, Quickoffice, DataViz, and Nuance Communications. The goal was to foster interoperability between document formats, most notably Open XML and the Open Document Format (ODF).

"Basically this is Microsoft sincerely going out and following up with what they did with OpenXML," said Peter O'Kelly, principal analyst with O'Kelly Consulting.

As part of that follow-up, Microsoft plans to support ODF in Office 2007 SP2, which is slated to ship next year.

On top of the Firefox plug-in, DII released Version 2.5 of the Open XML/ODF Translator , which supports Office 2003, 2007 and XP. The new version includes a set of ODF 1.1 compatible templates and chart enhancements for spreadsheet programs.

The templates provide preformatted documents, such as a business letter or fax sheet, that are based on either ODF or Open XML and allow predetermined conversions between formats.

DII also introduced an software developer kit for Java developers that aids in working with Open XML documents. The project aligns with the Apache POI project, which provides Java libraries for reading and writing in Microsoft Office formats.

All the DII software was released as open source projects.

"We have been seeing that a lot of people now understand that what is most important is the end user," said Jean Paoli, general manager of interoperability strategy for Microsoft. "Since for maybe a year now, we are seeing far less passion about the format issue and more rationality."

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Scotland is to host two pioneering datacenters, with plans being announced to build an eco-friendly cloud centre in Inverness, and the world's largest computing facility in Lockerbie.

A new business park, a "sustainable village" with hundreds of homes and what is claimed to be the world's largest datacenter, are to be built in the south-west of Scotland under an ambitious £800 million development plan.

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The Peelhouses datacenter in Lockerbie, which is being built by Scottish firm Lockerbie Data Centres, will use green energy generated from wind turbines and a new bio-mass power station.

The entire facility will be spread over 250,000 square metres, including the development of 800 new homes in the village. Waste heat generated by the banks of computer servers will be reused to heat the new village as well as the existing town, and the business park

Scottish IT services company Alchemy Plus, with backing from Microsoft, has revealed plans to build a £20 million cloud computing center on the Inverness harbour. Inverness was chosen as an ideal site for the large computing facilities because of its cold climate, which Alchemy intends to harness to reduce the need for cooling.

[ Learn more about what cloud computing really means from InfoWorld's cloud computing primer. ]

The 20,000-square-foot facility is billed as Scotland's first eco-friendly computing facility, with the heat created by the center being used to warm nearby businesses, including a nearby hotel.

The Inverness center will operate on a cloud computing model, enabling users to subscribe on a monthly basis for the IT resources their businesses uses. Alchemy claims this companies that took part in an 18-month pilot saw an average cost savings of 28 percent.

Lockerbie Data Centres still waiting for planning permission of its plans, but chief executive John Hume said he had already received interest from a number of IT firms keen to get involved with the project.

Hume said: "The worldwide shortage of suitable data storage and the high demand for local affordable housing presents a unique opportunity for Scotland and local residents."

"With global demand for data storage expected to double by 2012, demand already outstrips supply."

Chief executive of Alchemy Plus, Peter Swanson, echoed similar sentiments on the demand for datacenter space. "The current economic downturn is driving a rapid shift towards cloud-based services which offer greater economy and flexibility."

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VMware has introduced View 3, the updated version of its virtual data infrastructure (VDI) offering. The company claimed that the new product would reduce desktop storage demands by as much as 70 percent.

In addition, the company said that it could "decouple" a desktop from specific locations to create a personalized view of that desktop, accessible from any other device -- so that a desktop could now be visible from a laptop in another office.

[ Read about VMware's VDI Storage Considerations guide. And stay up to date on the latest virtualization developments with InfoWorld's Virtualization Report blog and newsletter. ]

Jocelyn Goldfein, VMware's global manager for its desktop business said that the move supported the current trend towards mobile working. "Users are no longer tied to a desk," she said. "They use PCs, thin clients, notebooks or even smartphones."

Goldfein said that View3 was part of the vClient initiative announced at VMWorld. She said that the company was now looking at the desktop in the same way that it had looked at the datacenter. "The problem with desktop virtualization is that you still need a device. When you consolidate in a datacenter, you can get rid of 90 percent of the servers, you can't do that with the desktop." She added that View 3 would help bring virtualized desktops to devices.

The main element in View3 is View Composer. This uses a new technology called Linked Clone to generate many virtual desktops from a master image. Only desktops could be created in seconds and centrally controlled by View Manager.

Tommy Armstrong, VMware's senior marketing manager for enterprise desktops said that View 3 users would be able to provision many machines with common software -- for example, Windows, with that "golden master" as VMware calls it. He said that this could also be used for patch management.

In addition, the company has released Offline Desktop, a feature that provides the means to securely move virtual desktops between the datacenter and a local laptop or desktop. The company claimed that this would enable users to "check out" a virtual desktop onto an ordinary PC, such as a laptop, run the virtual desktop locally, and then check it back in to the datacenter.

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