Facebook’s Effect on IE8

There’s some seriously bad behavior in Facebook that seems to kill IE8.  Leaving Facebook running overnight in IE results in the following memory utilization the next morning:

IE Working Set

That’s 1.7 GB of memory consumed by IE8 just for the tab that’s running Facebook.  You can usually tell that things have gone wonky because IE starts showing the error icon in the lower left hand corner.  Unfortunately, shutting down IE doesn’t always work — sometimes the Facebook tab keeps spinning in the background (each tab is running in a separate process).  The only recourse at this point appears to be to kill the process (just the Facebook tab process — easy to find because it’s the iexplore.exe process consuming more memory than any other), which crashes the tab and causes a reload.  IE stays alive (thanks to the multiple-process tab model) and reloads Facebook in its original, low memory state. 

It would be easy to blame IE8 for this behavior, but I suspect that this is really a problem with Facebook’s client-side javascript code.

Kindle eBook Pricing Problems

kindle book pricesThis seems like a pricing problem.  Look at the price of this book compared to the paperback.  Why are bits more expensive than atoms?  This is not a game — this is just unfortunate, especially for those of us who prefer our media in electronic form.

Guess What I’m Cancelling in 6 Months?

seattletimeslogo_homeHello from Amazon.com,

As a Kindle subscriber to Seattle Times, you might like to know of a price change to Seattle Times. Effective March 12th, 2010 the price of Seattle Times has changed to $9.99/month for new subscribers.

As an existing subscriber to Seattle Times you will continue to be billed at the previous rate of $5.99/month for six more months (until September 12th, 2010) after which you will be billed at the monthly rate then in effect. We believe that the Kindle edition of Seattle Times continues to provide excellent value for customers with a free 14 day trial period, wireless delivery via Whispernet, no long-term commitments, and substantial savings vs. regular print subscription rates.

As always you are free to cancel your subscription at any time. If you are still in the 14 day free trial period of your subscription you will not be charged, otherwise you will receive a prorated refund for the unused portion of your subscription. To change or cancel a subscription, please visit http://www.amazon.com/manageyourkindle

Sincerely, The Amazon Kindle team