I found how to improve in times the loading speed of my Internet Explorer. You know that during years of exploitation Windows and especially Internet Explorer gets clumsier and clumsier day by day. I reached the time now when I have to wait IE to load for about 5 to 15 seconds!!! This is really irritating for me. Few times I even forgot what I was going to start in IE.
I found by chance that there is a way to manage the ActiveX and Browser Helper Objects (BHO) in Internet Explorer 6.0. You can enable and disable them using the Add-ons manager located in Tools/Options/Programs/Manage Add-ons. In my IE there were 47 Add-ons! Imagine this – 47 DLLs are loaded in every single IExplore.exe process. Now I know the reason why my IE could not load more than 20-25 instances in one user session.
In the moment I instantly disabled all of them leaving only Fiddler, XML DOM Document 3.0, Google and Google Toolbar add-ons.
My add-ons list have many ActiveX objects for playing audio and video. There are two items for Windows Media Player, three – for Google, many – for Microsoft Office and different kinds of ActiveXs for various third party apps. And please note that I am not a fan of IE plugins and usually I am careful in preventing installation of such plugins. Image what this list will look like if I start to install every cool plugin that I found for IE.
After disabling almost most of the add-ons, my IE now loads for about 1sec. I have the feeling the Google Toolbar is a very badly written plugin, because disabling it makes my IE load for about 0.5 sec. Or it is just the way IE works when it has to create additional toolbar.
Nevertheless I think Microsoft should find a way to speed up loading of these plugins and isolate and provide better way for managing, versioning and isolating them.
This is a real life example how one good work done by Internet Explorer team, gets insulted by almost every Windows user on this world, just because of poorly written plugins.
Keep in mind that disabling add-ons can make some site inoperational for you. If this happens, you should enable the corresponding object again and restart IE.
UPDATE: I accidentally deleted the post. Now it is back, but the previous comments are lost :(. I will post them below.
Post by Angelarii
Great job. Apparently works for IE7 too, improved my startup time to less than a second!
Post by Stefan Dobrev
Google toolbar is not the safest add on you can install 🙂 Look here http://www.google-watch.org/toolbar.html I’d prefer not to install it on my PCs.
Post by Martin Kulov
Well, I am not a big fan of Google toolbar either. The only think that I can not remove it, is because this is the only way to see Google’s PageRank. I do not know any other way to easily display it on every page visit.