(still) disappointed by Microsoft

Microsoft has billions of dollars and tens of thousands of employees. They have the resources to produce amazing, innovative, high-quality software, and yet they consistently do not. In fact, they often seem to deliberately make bad design decisions. I simply cannot understand why this happens. Maybe it's the result of incompetent and autocratic management...

The IE8 tabs are a great example of this. Say you open five tabs, then close the second one. Does #4 get promoted to a sandbox, since it is now the third in the list? If you open a sixth tab, does it get a sandbox, because only two sandboxes currently exist, or not, because at least three tabs are already open? Is this counted globally or on a per-window basis (i.e. does opening a new window give you three more sandboxes)? If a non-sandboxed tab crashes, will that affect just other unprotected tabs, or can it take down the entire window, including the 'safely' sandboxed tabs? I'm sure there are more such issues.

Or you can just give every tab its own sandbox. The design is simpler, the implementation is much simpler, less code means fewer bugs and security problems. [I can imagine a malicious site opening three dummy tabs to fill the sandboxes, then a fourth with the actual payload.] Sure, it will consume more resources when someone opens fifty bookmarked webcomics at once, but it's a very acceptable tradeoff, given how cheap memory and processor cycles are these days.

Incidentally, is there any word on how well IE8 does on the Acid3 test?