Pushing the browser envelope too far?

Windows Live is Microsoft’s new set of online services.  Live.com is a portal page/RSS reader that provides the gateway into the world of Live services.  It’s chocked full of AJAX-iness (ß Is that a word?!) and has been evolving quickly over the past year since some really early alpha versions, originally called “Start.com”, were released.  The Live team has been developing at a fast paced clip.  They’ve been pumping out new versions almost every 2-3 months on average.

I had been using Live.com (and formerly Start.com before it) as my home page for some time.  In March, a new release added a lot of cool features and greatly improved the look-n-feel of the page.  It definitely made it much more consumer friendly.  However, my experience was that the performance of the site was a bit sluggish compared to before that release.  So much so, that I stopped using it as my homepage.  Whether this was a result of me using the IE7 beta or that my old home machine is a slow pokey 600mhz who knows? 

Scott Isaacs, one of the key architects from the Windows Live team, recently wrote a post on his blog about Live’s performance.  Check out this link to read about some of the lessons learned by the Live team when it comes to AJAX, et al:

https://spaces.msn.com/siteexperts/blog/cns!CE6C50D25BFAAA73!4852.entry

This type of information provides a great deal of transparency into what the Live team is working on.  These guys really are pushing the browser envelope and I'll likely be writing more about the cool stuff they are doing for developers in the future. In the meantime, hopefully they’ll get these types of issues figured out so I can set this great site back to my home page again!