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Pushing the browser envelope too far?

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Windows Live is Microsoft’s new set of online services.  Live.com is a portal page/RSS reader that provides the gateway into the world of Live services.  It’s chocked full of AJAX-iness (ß Is that a word?!) and has been evolving quickly over the past year since some really early alpha versions, originally called “Start.com”, were released.  The Live team has been developing at a fast paced clip.  They’ve been pumping out new versions almost every 2-3 months on average.

 

I had been using Live.com (and formerly Start.com before it) as my home page for some time.  In March, a new release added a lot of cool features and greatly improved the look-n-feel of the page.  It definitely made it much more consumer friendly.  However, my experience was that the performance of the site was a bit sluggish compared to before that release.  So much so, that I stopped using it as my homepage.  Whether this was a result of me using the IE7 beta or that my old home machine is a slow pokey 600mhz who knows? 

 

Scott Isaacs, one of the key architects from the Windows Live team, recently wrote a post on his blog about Live’s performance.  Check out this link to read about some of the lessons learned by the Live team when it comes to AJAX, et al:

https://spaces.msn.com/siteexperts/blog/cns!CE6C50D25BFAAA73!4852.entry

 

This type of information provides a great deal of transparency into what the Live team is working on.  These guys really are pushing the browser envelope and I'll likely be writing more about the cool stuff they are doing for developers in the future. In the meantime, hopefully they’ll get these types of issues figured out so I can set this great site back to my home page again!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 11, 2006
    Last night, when I showed up at the Northern Jersey UG, it turned out that the featured speaker wasn’t...
  • Anonymous
    May 11, 2006
    See - you found lot's of things to blog about.  Pretty good too.  Thanks.

    Yes, I have noticed that IE7 kills Live.com.  IE6 appears to load much faster.  Less than 2 seconds on a 1.7Ghz machine.

    IEy has stioll not been optimized as it is early beta code.  Next version will, I hope, work better.  I like the interface better than IE6 due to the tabs and the RSS reader.

    I have noticed that IE7 likes lot's of memory and a lot of CPU when it is rendering a page.  If the page hasn't completely downloaded it appears to get stuck.  Sometimes I have to quit the broswer an start again.  Yhe same thing happens with spaces.msn.com and My.msn.com.  All using very similar technology except for Atlas.
  • Anonymous
    June 16, 2009
    PingBack from http://workfromhomecareer.info/story.php?id=31751