Drip 0.3 has been released. It's a memory leak detector for IE. Very useful for a web developer who's creating rich client applications. I have been using it for some time and it has helped me a lot on several occasions.

New release brings some serious improvements from the previous version. Some bugs and problems have been fixed. What's more important is that Drip 0.3 in addition to showing DOM objects (that cause the leaks) that are not released from memory it now provides an option to show the values of their fields. For each DOM object you can open a properties window. In it you can find a lot of interesting information, possibly pointing you to what has caused the leak. The tool is really great and with every release it's getting better.

This release got me thinking, again. IE has been around for a long time (with all memory leak problems), but nobody was interested enough in developing such tool until recently. Appearance of Drip is just another sign that web development is on the rise. I wonder why? Is it because of Google and renewed interest it has created in remote access applications (XMLHttp. Again, technology for these applications has been around for a while, but became popular only recently). Or is it just another swing of the pendulum getting more people interested in web development again? Is it because mobile devices with wireless Internet access are becoming more and more popular? Or is there something else? (I'm sure there is) It's probably a combination of all these and other factors. I wonder, though, what awaits us in the future. Any thoughts?