Microsoft investigates another IE flaw report

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Overburdened Design ... Historical from Memory Shortages

Yes, the rendering libraries in question are, as NonZealot points out, used by most Microsoft applications. The design is overburdened; too much seems to depend on it. However, in the days where memory was scarce, and hard disks were slow, it was quire a good design compromise to reuse modules already loaded by the OS.

You see numerous examples of this practice in today's software as well: Adobe Reader 7.0, RealPlayer and QuickTime as well as Microsoft Office (and as I recall OpenOffice as well) all insist to this day on loading their libraries at startup. All part of "improved user experience" so that customers don't complain about the loading time of the apps. (Why do you suppose that FireFox is so much slower loading than IE on the same machine, when it's memory footprint is much smaller?)

Microsoft simply loads IE's rendering engine with the the OS. IE itself is just one of many shells available for the rendering engine. That's actually why Microsoft couldn't simply remove "IE"; things such as AOL's client and some CAD-file and graphic viewers use the same rendering libraries despite their different looks and feels.

Posted by: PMC-CON   Posted on: 08/30/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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