I've been a long time user of yahoo instant messenger. So I've upgraded it a few times through the years. The performance of the application has slowly degraded through time. Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on that phenomenon.
So why did I upgrade to the beta? Well, I had the false hopes that the latest version would do a better job on my laptop, which constantly bounces between a wireless and wired connection and the constant docking and undocking that I go through at work. The version I used could be counted on to repeatedly hang and just lock up.
So I upgraded! Dumb.
The UI feels substantially slower. I can see the repainting as I scroll around in the contact list. It's not like I'm running an old school pentium at 50 MHz. I have a respectable thinkpad thank you. When I was looking at the task manager process list in Windows, I noticed that my process takes up a whopping 40 megs.
That's more than IE and Firefox combined! Good lord. Do the programmers have no pride?
Your programming language might be able to do all that, but I'd be grateful if it wouldn't eat so much of entire computer in the process. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that buried in the brains of yahoo im is a cute little dynamic language interpreter ala javascript or ruby that devours everything in sight.
Comfortable for the programmer. Just not for the user.
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