Unnecessary Internet Explorer add-ons

This is related to a previous post I did back in March about add-ons slowing down my Aunt’s computers. I don’t use IE so I never payed attention to them before. After working on her computer I messed around with mine a bit to see how the add-ons impacted the application loading time and discovered that there are a handful of add-ons that are, more than likely, completely unnecessary for the typical user.

I went through the add-ons for IE on my computer and disabled 10 out of the 15 in there. I noticed a major difference in the loading time and haven’t had any issues since disabling them. Depending on what programs you have installed on your computer, you may have different add-ons and might have more that can be disabled without causing problems.

Go to the Tools menu -> Manage add-ons and wait a couple seconds for it to load the list. The ones I highlighted in the picture below I would say are perfectly safe to disable. If you later notice something weird, you can always go back in and enable them again. On the far right it shows you how long it takes each add-on to load. Some of them may not sound very long (.29 sec), but they add up and you definitely notice a difference even when you’re saving yourself only a few seconds.

disabled add-ons

If you’re noticing Internet Explorer being slow and can’t figure out what’s going on, try this, it made more of a difference than I expected it to.

Internet Explorer speed problem

My Aunt called me up awhile back asking me if I knew why Internet Explorer would be so painfully slow, on both computers, not just one. The first thing I did was remote into her computers one night and run the standard virus and spyware scans, but those didn’t fix the problem of IE taking a good chunk of time to load a page when first opening. I didn’t time it, but it probably took about a minute to load her homepage of msn.com.

I found this article from Microsoft with some good information, even though I didn’t get the “page cannot be displayed” error. It has basic tips for clearing out temporary internet files, the history, cookies, etc. All of that is a good place to start because if that isn’t done on a regular basis it could cause problems. None of that worked for either of my Aunt’s computers so I moved onto trying Internet Explorer (No Add-ons). Using that made her homepage pop up so much faster, so that told me it was one of the IE add-ons that was causing the problem. The article from Microsoft suggests disabling them one at a time to figure it out, but I found it easier to disable all of them and re-enable them one at a time. I don’t know why that was easier for me, but it was.

Test to see if using Internet Explorer without add-ons works by going to your start menu -> all programs -> accessories -> system tools and clicking on Internet Explorer (No Add-ons). If your browsing is faster using this then look below for disabling and re-enabling each add-on.

To disable/enable Internet Explorer add-ons:

1. Open IE -> go to your tools menu -> Manage Add-ons -> Enable or Disable Add-ons
2. The next thing you want to do is disable the add-ons either one at a time like the article says or, like in my case, disabling all of them and turning them back on one at a time. Doing that led me to discover that the two Skype plug-ins were slowing IE down.
   

After disabling/enabling an add-on you have to close and then reopen IE to make the settings take effect. I didn’t notice a difference right away. I noticed the speed improvement after opening and closing IE a couple times. The whole process is slightly irritating, but at least it fixed the problem.