Giving up on Internet Explorer
Posted January 7, 2010 – 9:06 pm
I am dumping Internet Explorer today! I just can’t take it anymore. Too frustrating.
So long IE!
I do this reluctantly, however, because IE is still the dominant web browser on the planet – and since I build websites, I want my sites to work properly in it.
Until now, I have always tried to do some major tasks each day in IE as well as in Firefox and Chrome. I thought that it was important to use all the major browsers regularly to stay up to the minute with how they worked.
But over time, I’ve used IE less and less because, for whatever reasons, it just seems to break an awful lot – plus it is slow and lacks the add-ons / plug-ins that have become so valuable in the other browsers.
Instead, I’ve used Chrome and Firefox more and more because they hardly ever have problems, they are both a lot, lot faster than IE, and their plug-in libraries add lots of great functionality. When, from time to time, those programs do have problems, they normally fix themselves with a quick shutdown and restart of the program.
With IE, stuff happens and I just can’t figure out what the problem is. Yesterday the deal was that something was wrong with how a web page was trying to use one of my plug-ins. I don’t actually know which one since the error message didn’t say and there was no obvious way to trace it. Usually the problem seems to relate to Flash, but who knows in this case.
Last week the problem was with my Yahoo mail account. For some reason (and for a long time), I get error messages when I manage my contacts. Since I just switched to using Yahoo as my primary contacts manager, this became a serious issue. I’ve contacted Yahoo and they say the problem is with IE – which it probably is, but I haven’t a clue what.
And for a long time – I think since I installed IE8 – I’ve experienced terribly long delays in opening up a new tab in IE. It can takes 20-30 seconds to open a new tab – during which time everything else in IE is frozen and inaccessible. No clue what causes this.
Anyway, time to reduce frustration and that means no more IE — well, that’s not really true. I will still need to use it from time to time to test that my sites still work in it.
UPDATE (1/31/10): Okay, I may have resurrected IE! While I still don’t plan to use it on a day-to-day basis, this will make it a lot less painful to test out my sites in IE from time to time.
This Microsoft forum page on IE8 slowness proved a good starting point and here’s what I did:
- Modified my ‘hosts’ file to remove website URLs for restricted sites. There was a huge list there – about 6,000 lines – generated by a program called Spybot. This page indicates that scanning this list can cause delays. I don’t even use this program anymore, so these are a relic from my previous computers. Note: I did not do the deletion via the method described, so I can’t attest to whether it works or not (it seems to for other people). I edited the file directly.
- Per this thread, I also removed a program that I was still using – SpywareBlaster. I was thinking to remove it anyway since Norton Internet Security 2009 seems to work so extremely well and maybe I’m doing overkill on the anti-spam stuff.
- Disabled all but a few ‘accelerators’. I had many running, almost none of which I had enabled myself. Removing them all was painless.
- I reset all all security settings to the original defaults per these directions from Microsoft (step #2).
- I disabled all but the most essential IE add-ons. As with accelerators, there were many that had accumulated and were probably unnecessary. I left in place ones. I left enabled Flash and Java and other ‘technical’ sounding add-ons, but disabled anything that sounded optional (like ‘research’ and ‘sharepoint spreadsheet launcher’)
- Removed all search providers but Google (though I doubt this did much of anything, I figured it couldn’t hurt).
- I also chopped back the disk space for ‘temporary internet files’ as these can sometimes contribute to slowness. I went with 50Mb which is quite small, but you can increase later if need be. Get there via: internet options > general > browsing history > settings > disk space.
I closed down and restarted IE after each of these steps to make sure nothing broke in the process. I also cleared cache completely a few times.
Not sure how much each individual step helped, but all together they produce a pretty dramatic improvement. New tabs, which used to take literally 20-30 seconds to open, now open within a 5-8 seconds. Still not nearly as fast as Firefox or Chrome, but at least it doesn’t make me want to scream!
