Microsoft set the tone for the update when Herman Ng, a program manager on the IE8 team, said the company is using the term "reliability" to broadly encompass all types of stability problems. That covers crashes, hangs, memory leaks, and other aggravating issues.

Microsoft is attempting to back up its reliability claims with information on how it conducts its testing. The company said it measures reliability based primarily on instrumentation built into Internet Explorer 8 and Windows 7. Shortly after the Windows 7 beta became available, Microsoft began gathering feedback.

Finding the Crashes

"After a week of monitoring this feedback we felt that we had reached a representative sampling of our customers," Ng said. "We found that approximately 10 percent of customers who had downloaded the Windows 7 beta had experienced some type of reliability problem in IE8."

The IE8 team also found that a small number of users were experiencing crashes on a more regular basis and that about 1.5 percent of all Internet Explorer sessions had encountered a crash. Ng called this "relatively good" for a prerelease version of Internet Explorer running on a beta operating system . Microsoft was also pleased to see that the new IE8 Crash Recovery feature was successfully helping customers recover from crashes 94 percent of the time.

"One of the approaches that we use to analyze this data is called a failure curve. A failure curve is essentially a bar chart where each bar represents a unique failure," Ng said. "The height of the bar represents the number of occurrences in the last 30 days."

The Root of Unreliability

Microsoft reports that Internet Explorer itself caused about 40 percent of IE8's reliability problems, and third-party components caused the other 60 percent. Ng also noted that 17 unique issues account for 50 percent of all reported reliability problems. Because users generally have lots of toolbars and extensions installed, he said, it's common to see this many third-party components at the top of the failure curve. (continued...)

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