Spyware Sucks

Andy Zeigler posted a comprehensive article about Loosely Coupled IE (LCIE), a new feature of IE8 that is designed to improve the reliability (and scalability and performance) of Internet Explorer.   He also briefly mentioned a benefit of LSIE called Automatic Crash Recovery (ACR)

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/11/ie8-and-loosely-coupled-ie-lcie.aspx

I saw ACR in action today, and took the chance to grab some screenshots for you, and experiment a little with ACR.

The first thing you will see is, of course, an error window:

Historically when we have seen this error IE has closed completely, and unless we have something like IE7Pro installed, which remembers what tabs we had open when IE crashes and offers to open the same set, we have invariably had to use IE's History feature to reopen the lost tabs.

With IE8, if one particular tab causes a problem, IE8 does *not* close completely. Instead, the one problem tab is closed and reopened, and the end user will see an alert warning that this has occurred:

One thing to bear in mind is that although IE8 does not close completely, all open tabs will be refreshed as part of the ACR process, but the way that it refreshes is different to normal (yes, I know, "different" is not a very technical explanation, but I haven't worked out why I am seeing what I am seeing).

For example, normally if the compose pane for my blog is refreshed I see this message:

I do *not* see the above message after an ACR - that being said, I still lose non-saved text.  Therefore, although we can describe what we are seeing as a "refresh", that is not a truely accurate explanation.  Hopefully the article Andy has promised to write about ACR will explain this difference in greater detail.