off the Hook

OK, many of you may be expecting something related to Domino or some other Lotus product here. If so, don't leave just yet.

So I have a PC at home that is about 6 years old. I rarely use it any more, but I have noticed it steadily getting slower and slower every time I do. Being a (semi) computer geek, I of course ensured that I was not running any unnecessary tasks, had plenty of free disk space, defragmented the hard drive, no viruses or malware, etc (and it runs Windows XP). Still it wasn't performing up to snuff. Realizing that all I really do is browse the internet, I wanted to blame my ISP, but my relatively non-powerful R61 does just fine. Then it hit me. The key difference is that on my laptop I have been using Firefox for over 2 years. I just let Windows Update do whatever it wants on the PC automatically and it had long ago upgraded me to IE7 and been updating ever since. I never bothered to switch on this old PC, but then I recalled hearing how much faster browsing web pages using Firefox is supposed to be compared to IE, so I firgured I'd give it a shot.

WOW! After 5 minutes to download and install Firefox 3.0.3, and migrating all of my IE stuff automatically, I feel like I have a brand new PC. We're talking 2 to 3 seconds to load pages that were taking 30 to 60 seconds with IE7.

Here is the most interesting part - When IE7 is running on my PC, all of the other applications I have running slow down too - in particular swapping between IE7 and the other apps (e.g., Notes) is painfully slow. When I close IE7, the problem immediately clears up.

Of course, your mileage may vary.

So what does this have to do with a Lotus blog? Well, lots actually. As I personally observed, it seemed to me that Notes was running slowly, which I blamed on the hardware at first, but have now discovered that it was the mere fact that I also had an IE7 window open that was causing the problem. Also, although I haven't specifically benchmarked performance against web-based Domino applications, it stands to reason that perhaps just switching your users from IE7 to Firefox (assuming your apps are not written exclusively for IE), could give users an instant performance boost.

I would be curious to hear whether you have had similar or different experiences. Regardless, I'm just thrilled to have regained so much time when using this older PC.