A Consuming Experience: optimisation

Showing posts with label optimisation. Show all posts

Saturday, 19 December 2009

How to speed up Internet Explorer 8

I just wanted to note for those not aware of it that the tricks and tips on how to speed up Internet Explorer 7 also mostly work to help Internet Explorer 8 go faster too.

These are the ones I've tried in Windows Vista with Internet Explorer 8 - try them at your sole risk if you've a different version of Windows, and remember to backup your registry first, you have been warned! (I will report on Windows 7 soon):

These tips on speeding up Internet Explorer 7 which I mentioned from this site (but not the other tips on it, most of which seem to have been changed in IE8 for the better so they're already set):

Increase maximum simultaneous connections
Disabling ClearType
Disabling the SSVHelper Class plugin

Stopping checks for printers on remote computer - NB, in Vista the key to check for network shares doesn't seem to be there so I didn't try that fix, you probably shouldn't either

Friday, 3 October 2008

How to speed up Internet Explorer 8 beta 2

A tip: it seems that the registry hacks to make Internet Explorer 7 go faster on Windows XP (including making new tabs open faster) also work on IE 8 beta 2. They did when I tried them anyway, being a speed, optimisation and productivity freak!

So if you want to speed up IE8, you could try the IE 7 registry hacks on IE8 - I've produced some .reg files which you can use as a shortcut instead of having to open the Registry Editor yourself, see the previous post which has full instructions on how to use them.

If you had previously done the registry tweaks on IE7, then installed IE 8, I suspect the old tweaks got overwritten in the process. Re-doing the tweaks has certainly made noticeably speeded up my Internet Explorer 8 beta, anyway.

(The other IE7 tweaks I previously blogged seem to already have been made as standard in IE 8 beta 2, or haven't been wiped out by the installation of IE 8 but you might want to double check especially if you hadn't tried them before on IE 7.)

Saturday, 26 May 2007

How to speed up Internet Explorer 7 more

I've already blogged some tips on how to speed up Internet Explorer 7 in Windows XP with some registry tweaks you can do by just clicking a couple of reg files (also seems to work on Internet Explorer 6, Windows 98 etc). The first hack is the most well known, and works by increasing the number of simultaneous connections IE makes to a Web server, which speeds up downloading a web page and its accoutrements i.e. images etc. (For those who've not tried them: get the tweaks.)

But IE7 was still too slow for me, especially in opening new tabs. And unlike my fave browser Firefox (), if you try to open a new tab in IE another annoyance is that you can't keep working in the existing tab in the meantime - the concept of multitasking seems alien to IE, everything you're doing in the current browser tab like scrolling, clicking a link etc grinds to a halt till the new tab has finished opening. How to open new tabs in Internet Explorer 7 more quickly became my next quest.

Well now I've found some further IE7 hacks, from Reliance PC - and they really work to speed up opening new tabs, yay! They involve a combo of things: disabling the phishing filter, feed checking, ClearType in IE (which by the way I have turned on generally and it really helps visibility and reading) and the SSVHelper Class plugin, none of which tricks I'd heard of, and then doing the same popular max connections tweak I'd mentioned before and had already done so didn't try again.

Try these tips yourself: Tuning IE7 for Better Performance; plus registry tweaks (You then need to close down and restart IE7.)

I don't know which one did the trick, it's probably the combo, but they sure worked for me. New tabs open and do their startup thang on average about twice as quickly as they used to. Which to impatient me makes a helluva difference.

Many of us hopefully know enough to avoid falling for phishing scams anyway (and it's a bonus that info on sites you're visiting stops being sent to Microsoft if you turn off the phishing filter). If you like reading RSS feeds you're better off getting a separate free feed reader anyway, rather than doing it through IE 7. And obviously if you need ClearType in IE don't do that particular hack, but most of us shouldn't notice much difference.

I'd add that while I was at it, I also decided to disable some other Internet Explorer 7 add-ons or plugins. I figured if I wasn't using a particular addon it was better to turn it off and that might speed things up further, so I did. So far nothing's complained about missing plug ins but I can always re-enable an add on if necessary.

If these tricks worked for you too I'd be glad to hear about it. And if anyone has further tips for even more speed speed speed, please let me know. Faster, IE7! Go! Go!

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