Photographs courtesy of Toby Watt - lawyer, friend and photographer extraordinaire...

Welcome to IE-Vista

Dedicated to providing advice and support to users of IE7 and IE8

AUTOMATIC CRASH RECOVERY

The first thing you will see is, of course, an error window:



Historically when we have seen this error IE has closed completely, and unless we have something like IE7Pro installed, which remembers what tabs we had open when IE crashes and offers to open the same set, we have invariably had to use IE's History feature to reopen the lost tabs.

With IE8, if one particular tab causes a problem, IE8 does *not* close completely. Instead, the one problem tab is closed and reopened, and the end user will see an alert warning that this has occurred:



One thing to bear in mind is that although IE8 does not close completely, sometimes other open tabs will be refreshed as part of the ACR process, but the way that it refreshes is different to normal behaviour (yes, I know, "different" is not a very technical explanation, but I haven't worked out why I am seeing what I am seeing).

For example, under normal conditions, if the tab which is displaying the compose pane for my blog is refreshed I see this message:



We do see the above message after an ACR - that being said, during the above crash I still lost non-saved text.

Andy Zeigler, Program Manager for Internet Explorer, has supplied a detailed explanation as to what happened during the crash described above:

"In Beta 1, basically, we create a tab process each for your tabs a low integrity (protected mode = on) and medium integrity. If you have multiple tabs in the same process, as you do in your example, technically, they've all crashed, because generally, something bad has happened in the process (i.e. an AV) and the OS has to kill it. This means that we have to recover all of the tabs in the process.

We save all of the data about your tabs, and other data, such as your travel log, the order of your tabs, and which one was active. When we recover, we have to re-navigate them to whatever pages they were at, which looks a lot like a refresh. We only show the recovery notification bubble on your active tab, as not to bother you with lots of bubbles or a gold bar, etc. We want you to be back on your feet, browsing again, as quickly as possible.

I haven't looked at the page you were on, but it looks a lot like an alert dialog, probably generated by javascript. The webpage is probably running a script or has hooked a DOM event that detects when you're navigating away from the current page. My guess is that the script and DOM state is terminated along with the process, so the event is never fired, and the dialog is never shown."