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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Charles Hughes who wrote (22108)	12/10/1998 11:55:00 PM
From: rudedog	Respond to of 24154

Chaz - The forced MSFT upgrade cycle and inefficient OS code techniques also benefits those hardware mfrs I was doing an analysis of code paths between IE3 and IE4 at one point, and I found a very surprising thing - IE3 tended to use bigger pieces of memory to carry compressed and uncompressed versions of things - the compressed version could then be checked against a compressed image on the web, and the uncompressed version executed on a match. This was a clear trade-off, spending memory to reduce CPU cycles. IE4 went exactly the other way. Nearly every instance of maintaining multiple phases of an image was eliminated, and thus the CPU had to execute the phase change for every test, as well as to execute against the image. The result - smaller memory footprint, but lots more cycles needed to do the same job. I thought at the time that this was a likely outcome of the old boy's club. After all, a design that burns memory to save cycles favors older, slower designs. Intel is not in the memory business, and the OEMs would much rather sell a faster CPU than a memory upgrade (most people don't go back to the original vendor for memory anyway). I'm not even suggesting open collusion - just that it's obvious that one hand washes the other. Does the consumer lose out? That's a harder question, but there has clearly been little interest by anyone in the industry in extending product life cycles, which would seem to increase cost of ownership since upgrades become almost mandatory.