Updates to the live.com page

We made some updates to the Live.com page late Friday. We are working on a much larger set of items, but we felt we could not hold this one off until our release. There are two main fixes, as far as i am concerned. 

The first fix is a UI change, which makes the page a lot more appealing. We now show images in an RSS feed inline. If there are multiple images in the feed, we cycle through them and point to the correct headline as we change the image. As far as i know, this works on all browsers we support (IE6, IE7, FF 1.0, 1.5 and Opera 9 Preview). There is a small UI issue with Opera 9, but that is not very visible.

The second fix is not visible to the user, but probably will have more impact. We had a lot of memory leaks in our RSS Reader code. We have now fixed all of it. I think this is probably the most important change we have done since our original release. We realize we still have some memory leaks in our other gadgets, but this gets rid of most problems. What this means to users is that the page can be left open longer and we will not drain PC resources. This should also make the page feel more responsive and faster.

You can find more details in our team space at MSN Spaces. There have been some requests to turn off this feature if necessary. I think that would make a good setting as well. We will see if we can do that.

- Venkat