A Potential Buggy Design Feature of IE 8

Microsoft had been putting great effort and patience in refining their next OS to come, Windows 7, and everything around the much expected pending Windows. One big change Windows 7 will bring is a total refreshment to Internet Explorer, IE 8, a designed replacement for IE 7, the browser that came with Windows Vista and prevailed within it.

The development of IE 8 is quite smoother compared against Windows 7 thanks to its being only a component of an OS. By January of this year, RC1 version of IE 8 is already done and was released for public testing.

IE 8 is a great Internet browser in terms of performance which many people believe will establish IE 8 the best IE browser ever.

Nonetheless, I hadn’t started to use IE 8 until I installed the M3 build of Windows 7, and ever since one thing always bothers me in this grand-to-be IE. Well, it’s nothing big though, I’d think Microsoft might claim it as another design feature.

It will take a little more time to describe the problem, but pictures speak better…

The following tests were done within Windows XP Professional SP3, Windows Vista Ultimate x64 w/SP1, and Windows 7 Beta.

Okay. Let’s be frank. If you never use a web-based service to check your mailbox, you don’t really need to read along.

If you do and you happen to use IE 8 now, I’ll highly suggest you to continue.

Say I want to check my Live mails in IE 8, so I type in mail.live.com, and after logon, this is what I should get.

Okay then. Say I want to check another Live mailbox, so I open another IE and type in the right address, now guess what?

Unlike in IE 7, where in such case I will get another logon page, IE 8 will automatically open your opened mailbox again.

They are showing a same mailbox. Notice that I didn’t enter any password, because IE 8 automatically remembered the cookie when I logged on for the first time and use it for this time.

Maybe you are asking, so what? I had opened two copies of my mailbox, so what?

Well, there are worse scenario. Check this.

Say while checking your mails, you fire up another IE and direct it to browse some news. While reading the news, you feel like to have some coffee, so you close both windows showing your mailboxes, leave your computer and head towards coffee machine.

Remember that now there is only one IE window on desktop presenting news. Okay. Now fire up a new IE windows or just click to open a new tab, type in the Live mail address, and see it for yourself. That mailbox you shut down before you went for coffee is now opened.

Imagine the consequence…Not quite great.

If you want to get rid of this, you have to shut down all IE windows. After that, you have to log on when you want to visit your mails.

It seems that, for any running IE windows, quite unlike IE 7, IE 8 will share cookies between them. The only way to avoid this is you have to close all running IE windows, only after which normal cookies become expired.

And this "bug”, or another “design feature”, will surely bring more problems and inconvenience, sometimes annoyance, say if you want to check two mailboxes at the same time.

Regardless of which platform IE 8 is running upon, the results are the same.

And some of you might doubt whether it’s a problem of Live mails. Nope. Tried many, all same results.

Rumor had it that IE 8 had already RTMed, which I truly hope not.

I had searched quite a lot over the Web to find if I am a dumb idiot ignoring some obvious settings in option, but no luck with that.

If you know how to change this back to IE 7 style, please leave your info to tip me how.

If this is truly a left out design buggy feature, I’d really hope Microsoft would rethink about it and finally change it.

UPDATE:

Microsoft won’t change it. It’s a side effect of a brand new framework which is deployed with the intention to better secure IE. However, Microsoft did provide a solution by adding “-no merge” to the IE launch command.