Same thing here, I am having to consistently restart 2-3 times a day during a span of 15 minutes when I update my positions. How do you revert back to a previous version? I didn't know if that was possible since all the updates are automatically downloaded.
When you start up TWS, before logging in, look for more options. Then you can expand the window and pick the version you want - stable, latest, or beta in order of oldest to newest. I also had some stability/resource usage issues with Latest and went back to Stable even tho there are some newer features in Latest that I do like.
Unfortunately it takes a relatively minor number of major issues to outweigh the benefits of the newer features. Anyways thanks for the quick help, it is much appreciated.
for all the TWS layout pros in the thread: what do you do with the level 2 trader windows disappearing from time to time? I've always manually put them back in - what if you use 4 or 5 of them? huge pain...I've never got them back with the recovering settings.
I do not get it .... 30 years in the business, billions $$$ worth and the platform ...... real ass-pain. Auto-restart sucks, need to recover settings to previous day's multiple times a week because my quote board just ... vanishes The same happens to my fiance ... If I trade the way they code I would be living in the woods already
Same issues here. The layout of each page can't be unified. One example. Deleting one column from one page, the result doesn't propagate to other pages. With 20+ watch lists, this is not cool. How can we get help from IB? Does IB watch this forum, or they just sponsor it as an ad?
You need to be a black belt level TWS user to even dream of keeping columns from moving around at random. Even then, 2 weeks is considered impressive. By the time you get your columns re-set, you IBALGO presets will likely have been wiped out. Source: 12 years of using TWS daily with at least 20 built from scratch prefs files.
I reported some of the cases, but they are still there. Most of the ones I reported had to do with full screen- full window and docking windows. But the columns bug is pretty bad. It seems like once you get it, things fall apart further. I always restart. I notice the column bug is bad. It seems like it is confused with the common window has to deal with multiple tabs. For example, even the UI does not make sense. You can have the same trade log window in two layouts. Different width windows. But you can set, auto size columns. How is that not ripe for bugs? Also I rebuilt my XLM, by redoing my layout. It took awhile and I had to test-debug it. At least I load faster. Bottom line: Open a ticket with steps to reproduce it. I am pretty sure these are old bugs that are compounded by the new frameless layout. It is probably the legacy issues from Classic to Mosaic. AND don't get an epileptic seizure when the column headers start flashing.
As a software engineer, I understand why IB's software sucks so much. In a word: technology debt. They've had the same platform for 20+ years. The same old Java codebase, for an extremely complex product with zillions of features. In software development, TWENTY YEARS is a horribly long time. Language evolve, technologies come and go, people come and go. I bet there's nobody left at IB from the original team. Nobody has any overall vision of the whole thing, and nobody fully understands how everything works. Even the public documentation is outdated (e.g. this is not how you reset the paper trading amount), and they're incentivized to keep that up to date for customers. I can't even imagine the state of the internal documentation after 20 years. Bugs are often caused by deep ramifications from the code base ("action at a distance"). Superficial fixes typically bring more bugs, or only work in the most obvious cases. Testing helps, but until you understand the underlying code at the deepest level and fix the bug at the root, you can only patch the part of a wall-long crack that's in front of your eyes. The most realistic way for TWS to shape up at this stage, is to be coded from scratch, in a modern language without all the warts of Java, with a fresh team, and taking advantage of the lessons learned along since the late 90's - by tapping into the wisdom of the old engineers who are still around. I don't, however, see IB doing that any time soon. Far more likely that a better platform will appear.
I disagree about Java {languages being sized for the task is much more appropriate than it being "older" or "newer"}, but 110% agree with each and every other observation. "Right on."