5 Ways to Improve IE 8 performance

Three months ago, Microsoft released the 8 edition of its Big Blue E. The Internet Explorer 8 was launched at a time when all its competitors in web market were about to up the ante. Chrome 2.0, Firefox 3.5.1 , Safari 4 are giving Microsoft’s default Windows browser a run for money.  Despite such stiff competition, IE 8 has managed to receive more of positive reviews. Well, IE8 has come of age offering almost everything right out of the box. Here we would present the

1. Browse the netbooks more easily

If you are using a netbook then you might need to switch to the full screen mode too often. Simply pressing the F11 removes the traces of browsers and allows the web page to occupy the entire screen. When you move hover the mouse pointer near the top the hidden portion of the screen reappears temporarily.

To sort out this bug, here’s a simple solution. Open the web page and create a shortcut IE on your desktop, right-click it and select Properties. After the iexplorer.exe in the target box type a -k followed by a space and web address.

For instance, suppose you wanna view Office Live Workspace in fullscreen all the time, put it in this order

“C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe” –k https://workspace.office.live.com

2. Maximize screen space

The menu bar in Internet Explorer (File, Edit Tools and so on) is quite handy. But it takes up a valuable space on your screen. Most of you don’t realize that its easy to remove the menu and bring it back easily when needed.

If your Menu bar is showing select the View>Toolbars and click on Menu Bar to uncheck it. Whenever you want it back, just press the alt key.

3. InPrivate Browsing

Like most other browsers, Microsoft has also included the new InPrivate browsing mode. Browsing in this mode removes all the traces of browsing history, temporary files and log-in data.

If you don’t wanna turn the InPrivate browsing feature on and off. You can create a shortcut to launch a particular website with InPrivate mode activated.

To do create a shortcut as described above, append - private and follow it by a space, followed by the web address of the site you want to access. For instance, if you want to surf just private www.mybank.co.au

If you double click this shortcut, it loads up www.mybank.co.uk with InPrivate mode switched on everytime.

4. Extend your download limit

IE sets the default limit for simultaneous downloads to two that ensures your bandwidth is used effectively. Now that there are faster connections available you can increase the number of download you can run at the same time.

There is a simple wizard to increase the download limit to 10. Visit the link and click this problem

5. Troubleshoot common problem

If your Internet Explorer 8 crashes too often, it might be a problem related with one of your add-ons. To check this run the browser with all add-ons switched off.

The more you install add-ons, the accelerator menus become more crowded. To control this, go to the Tools>Manage Add-ons. It will show all the currently loaded add-ons by default. However, you can change this to show all the buttons by pressing Show.

On the far right you have the Load time column. Click on the Load time column header to sort by the time each add-on takes to load. This would show the add-ons that are slowing down your browser’s start up time. Press the Disable button for add-ons speed up IE 8.