How to make IE open new tabs faster

fine

tom — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 05:13:46 GMT

IE is slow even without any addons, it is still the slowest browser on the market, and still seems to be flawed with bugs from years ago.

re: How to make IE open new tabs faster

EricLaw [MSFT] — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 01:54:26 GMT

@jp: There's no question that bad addons can result in a slow user-experience, and I'd bet that this is the problem that Zack is seeing. Since he didn't describe any troubleshooting he might have done, it's hard to say which addon(s) or products he's specifically having problems with.

As for your case, there are things that will impact performance even in no-addons mode, as I noted over here: http://blogs.msdn.com/ieinternals/archive/2009/07/20/IE8-Performance-and-Speed-Tips.aspx

Tab startup times in the .3 second range sound about right on the hardware you describe, keeping in mind that starting a new tab is spinning up a new process (LCIE). 1 second is definitely at the long end of things, but it's going to be harder to spot the bottleneck vs. the degenerate multi-second cases that some users in bad configurations see.

re: How to make IE open new tabs faster

jp — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 01:17:33 GMT

@EricLaw, Whether in no add-ons mode or not, my tabs *never* open as fast as in your video. (My computer is an Intel Core Duo, 1.67 Ghz with 2GB ram.)

This video by Zack Whittaker shows how slow it can be:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd9PfQElXJE

You can also read his zdnet post:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/igeneration/?p=1857

While my performance is not this bad, it is slow enough to cause frustration (at best around 0.3 or so seconds and at worst a second or two).

To be honest, I don't understand why IE has to keep the tab in the background "connecting" while other browsers immediately move it to the front. But I am not a developer...

re: How to make IE open new tabs faster

hAl — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 21:30:24 GMT

I did switch off the AVG safe search addon before as it slowed new tab opening down by about half a second.

re: How to make IE open new tabs faster

Damien — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:47:46 GMT

Sam, thank you for providing an example of a comment which is entirely useless. Saying something is "slow" without even trying to measure it is lazy. Why bother writing if you're not going to write something useful to the IE team or anyone else?

Good luck blocking Google's spyware and ads with Chrome.

re: How to make IE open new tabs faster

Sam — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:42:26 GMT

IE is slow even without any addons, it is still the slowest browser on the market, and still seems to be flawed with bugs from years ago.

If you want to open tabs faster then try a new browser, I have to say that Google Chrome opens new tabs faster than any other browser I've tried.

I installed it on my flatmates 5 year old laptop, he has been using IE8, and now he says the Internet runs 'just like new'.

re: How to make IE open new tabs faster

EricLaw [MSFT] — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 17:02:57 GMT

@hd: Yes, I'm running a few add-ons, including menu add-ons (no impact on performance: see http://blogs.msdn.com/ieinternals/archive/2009/07/20/IE8-Performance-and-Speed-Tips.aspx) and the fantastic Mouse Gestures add-on (BHO) from Ralph Hare, which is well-written and runs very fast.

The magic of software means that one can code nearly anything, given sufficient time and investment. Trying to calculate a Toolbar add-ons likely size based on its last size is one such possibility, although it wouldn't be perfectly reliable and it's not clear that users would be significantly happier with poorly performing add-ons that are still slow to appear and spike the CPU, etc. For single-core netbooks and the like, delegating to a background thread won't help very much.

re: How to make IE open new tabs faster

hd — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:37:07 GMT

Why can't ie8 load addons in the background?

As for the popping toolbars problem why don't you develop and algorithm to calculate the area required by the addon by comparing the delta between the original size of controls in ie and the size of controls after the addon is loaded

(say the decrease in size of the web browser control due to a toolbar addon for an instance)

IE could determine the area consumed by addons on the first run (and any subsequent addon changes) and allocate space for the them when a new tab is created

re: How to make IE open new tabs faster

hd — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:27:12 GMT

I checked out your video.Actually it looks surprisingly fast on what I see on my machine.But I also see that you have no addons(visible) running.

Is the speed comparable to what we see on you video with any addons running (say windows live toolbar for an instance)?

re: How to make IE open new tabs faster

EricLaw [MSFT] — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 02:49:56 GMT

I don't know what Seth's machine looks like, but here's a view from my older, slower machine: www.enhanceie.com/ie/newtab.wmv

New tabs appear as fast as I hit CTRL+T.