Posted by: kurtsh | May 3, 2010

WHITEPAPER: Internet Explorer 8 Performance Optimization

image Internet Explorer 8 was designed to be a fast browser: it should start quickly and load pages instantly. The ‘new tab’ page makes navigating the internet much faster and easier. Internet Explorer 8 also pioneered innovations like tab isolation to improve stability and automatic crash recovery. With these performance improvements, Internet Explorer 8 has enhanced the browsing experience of over 300 million consumers.

This white paper will help you learn how to fix some common configurations of Internet Explorer 8 that slow down your web browsing. We will give you some insight into the complex browser ecosystem and walk through a series of tips and tricks for how to enhance the performance of Internet Explorer 8 to get you to your destination as quickly as possible. We will present these tips from least technical to most technical, so you can try as many solutions as you feel comfortable with.

Here’s a sample:

  1. Add-ons cause most browser crashes, accounting for over 70% of Internet Explorer 8’s crashes. Slowdowns in Internet Explorer 8 are very often caused by add-ons – especially when you open a new browser window or tab.
  2. If Internet Explorer 8 has an abnormally long load time, it may be because you have a large number of sites listed in your Restricted or Trusted sites zone. Some security programs like SpyBot Search & Destroy will place thousands of sites in these zones to try and prevent you from accessing unsafe websites. Although this is not the recommended implementation, you may have unknowingly applied this setting if you have ever used their “Immunize” feature.
  3. …it is widely known that older versions of Adobe Flash may result in browser crashes or hangs. If you have Google Desktop or other toolbars and extensions installed, please visit their home pages to make sure you have updated to the latest version.
  4. If a user agent string gets too long, the web site that is trying to read it may refuse your browser’s request for site content. This may result in an unnecessary slowdown as the web site and your browser communicate back and forth requesting information.
  5. Internet Explorer 8 allows the browser to make up to 6 connections per server to retrieve information to display your web page. This means that when downloading multiple files at the same time, you can have a maximum of 6 concurrent downloads at any time from a particular server. Sometimes, increasing the maximum number of connections Internet Explorer 8 can make with a server at any given time can increase the performance of your browsing and downloading experience.

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