You know you need to go to bed when...

Went to google to see if anyone'd been crazy enough to link to this blog, and sure enough, someone did a few months ago. This blog's name gets some kudos, but apparently the author of the other blog found the content here unremarkable. :^) Fair enough. Except when I dig up some JEditorPane links, I'd tend to agree.

Been following links from that fellow's blog for a while now, and stumbled on something linked to off of the cafe au lait site, which deals with Java and is occasionally updated in my few years of dropping by every six months or so.

Anyhow, here's the cute, nearly bloggable quote from the page entitled What makes IE so fast?:

In other words, instead of sending a SYN packet like every other TCP/IP application in the world, IE would send out the request packet first of all. Just to check. Just in case the HTTP server was, oh, say, a Microsoft IIS server. Because IIS' HTTP teardown sequence looked like this:

[slightly technie stuff blanked out -R]

The reason for this? Why, to make subsequent connections from IE clients faster. If the connection isn't torn down all the way, all IE has to do is send an HTTP request, with no preamble-- and the server will immediately respond. Ingenious!

They probably called it "Microsoft Active Web AccelerationX™©®" or something.

You can't help but be impressed with everything MS does to give other MS technologies every advantage possible. This is the kind of interconnectedness I've just never quite seen in the open source world. Of course MS is in the position to do these sorts of things to the point that they make a difference precisely because they already have the lion's share of the market.

As I've said for a while now, Microsoft is a bunch of downright super ideas runs through a profit-maximization machine. The latter part is what causes "all of that evil".