Optimization is arguably a lot about intuition. You have a hunch, and see if it sticks. Sure you can use profilers and instrumentation, but they are more like hunch generators than anything else. This one wasn’t as intuitive, at least not to me, but it makes sense when you think about it. I have an 8 Gb file of...

At the beginning of 1999, one company had all the momentum on the Web: Microsoft. While Netscape was adjusting to corporate life with new owner AOL and trying to figure out its browser strategy, Microsoft was preparing to release version 5 of its browser, Internet Explorer. Like the version before it, IE5 would...