Here’s something out of left-field that I don’t think anyone except the geniuses at Microsoft expected. In recent tests, it’s been revealed that Internet Explorer 8 uses twice the memory of Firefox. As if that wasn’t enough to blow your mind, get this shit:

In a test involving IE8 Beta 2, IE7 and Firefox 3.0.1 10 rich media sites were opened in each on a machine running Vista with 2 GB RAM. In the end IE8 sucked up 380MB of memory, IE7 260MB and Firefox accounted for 159MB. You would be surprised to know that when Windows XP starts it takes 130 - 150MB, then start IE8 and suddenly you would be looking at a larger memory print than Windows XP

Yes. Microsoft has managed to make IE8 such a RAM hog, that it takes a significantly more amount of memory to start it than it does to start Windows XP. Is this the nail in the coffin for Internet Explorer? Surely Microsoft will force everyone to upgrade to IE8 and those with older computers will be caught in the dust. Think, Microsoft! Think!

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We would have been a little more excited if somebody else had leaked their software by mistake and allowed everybody to download for free, nonetheless we are slightly excited to learn that Microsoft Japan mistakenly put Internet Explorer 7 (Japanese version) on Windows Update this afternoon. The above screen cap was taken at 2:57 pm Tokyo time today. Some Japanese users have even managed to install the new browser successfully, keeping in mind that the public release should be in 2008.

The company took the program down and issued an apology afterwards, but we think there’s not much to be sorry about. They even taught people how to uninstall it. Yeah, like we want those extra bugs on your super stable OS. –Sam Chan

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