IE 7 beta 2 = very beta

29Mar/062

IE 7 beta 2 = very beta

I just installed IE 7 beta 2 on my backup machine. It lasted about 10 minutes. It was unusable. In the brief flashes I did see, it looked like it worked OK for rendering pages. But it kept shooting the CPU up to 99% and staying there. I did my part and sent the error reports to MS.

The site it seemed to have the most trouble with was out Exchange OWA site. First it blocked a popup when I clicked “Reply”. Ok, I’m sure I can allow the popup for that site. Whoops, nope. I’ve locked up. OK, we’ll restart. Browse to the OWA again, whoops locked up loading the message.

On a positive note, this web site finally looked the same in IE 7 and Firefox. Yay! I can use this design, I just have to hang on until IE 7 is stablized.

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http://www.todhilton.com tod

Hmm, I’ve been using the IE7 Beta 2 since it’s release and haven’t seen anything like that. I have seen some minor bugs, but nothing that has made it unusable or spike the proc like you describe. Oh, and I use OWA every single night/weekend without any issues [yes, you do have to enable popups for it though]. Sorry to hear about your experience.

I’m using the subsequent releases on my work machine and there are definite improvements though. So keep hope!
Aaron Sauve [MSFT]

It sounds like you have an incompatible add-on installed. You can tell for sure by running IE in “No Add-ons Mode” (Start->Programs->Accessories->System Tools->IE (No Add-ons)). If the problem goes away in that mode then one of your add-ons is incompatible. In the beta the only solution if this is the problem is to disable the incompatible add-on from Manage Add-ons.

If that doesn’t fix the problem, the other scenario we’ve seen the CPU spike is when google desktop search is installed. If no add-ons mode does not solve your problem and you have desktop search installed that might be the issue. You can set it to not index history files to solve the problem if that’s the case.