I’ve been an advocate of Internet Explorer for a long, long time. I don’t know what version I started with, but it was old. I think they used Roman numerals back then. Even when all the wonks started advocating Firefox, I stuck with IE. I dabbled with other browsers, though. I have Safari on my iPod, along with Opera. I also have Opera on my aging laptop, which gets sluggish with IE. I’ve used Firefox enough to know that I don’t prefer it over IE. Its tendency to cache everything under the sun causes me no end of grief as a web developer. I make changes to a web site and people complain that the old text is still there. I have to tell them to do a dozen or so hard refreshes to see what anyone using IE or other browsers can already see. And for all the complaints about security problems and exploits, I never caught a virus or a trojan in all my years on IE on numerous computers.
However, IE’s big problem—and it’s getting worse—is the way that its memory demands increase over a single session. I suspect that the biggest problem is memory leaks in Java and Javascript, but it starts out needing only a couple of hundred MB of RAM and by the end of a few hours it’s gobbling 1.5 GB of memory and slowing everything else down. Of course, I can just exit and restart the browser, but I shouldn’t have to.
I’ve used Google Chrome from time to time, and I like how lightweight and snappy it is. I decided to test it out this morning on a usual round of website visits. After a few hours of doing all manner of things, it’s still only using 50 MB of RAM. That’s less than IE takes on startup. So I think I’m going to make the switch to Chrome for my home computer. So far I haven’t seen anything that doesn’t work properly.
I did some more website housecleaning to make sure pages are displaying properly with the new template. While I was doing it, I redid my Store page to make use of Amazon’s aStore function. All I need to do is add a single line of code to my page and I get the entire store loaded into the page. I picked all the books and anthologies and added them to the store. Very slick—it even puts the shopping cart in the site.
I finished The Devil’s Company by David Liss and started The Masuda Affair by I.J. Parker, which I’m reading in pdf on my Kindle. It’s a period crime novel set in Japan. I haven’t read any of the previous books by this author, but I was intrigued when she approached me to see if I would be interested in reviewing her forthcoming book. I like books set in Japan and I like crime novels, so it seemed a fit. The main character is Akitada, a government official traveling home after a business trip. He encounters an abandoned boy outside a village where they are celebrating a three-day festival that welcomes home the spirits of dead relatives. Akitada recently lost his own son to disease, and he and his wife have been drifting apart in the aftermath of that loss, so he takes the boy’s plight to heart and becomes enmeshed in a mystery that involves some of the wealthiest people from the area. So far so good.
We also finished The Charming Quirks of Others by Alexander McCall Smith and backtracked to the first book in the series, The Sunday Philosophy Club. I think I like this series and the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books better than his 44 Scotland Street and Corduroy Mansions series because they focus primarily on one character and those around her.
I received an advanced copy of the next Michael Connelly novel, The Reversal, yesterday, so that will go to the top of my reading pile.
For Amy Grant fans: her newest album, Somewhere Down the Road, is available for MP3 download for $2.99 today only.
