Ever noticed how opening Internet Explorer can take forever on some PCs? That’s generally because your add-ons are slowing it down to a crawl—and even worse than that, they affect creating new tabs as well.

Over at the official Internet Explorer blog, they’ve put together a chart that shows the most popular add-ons sorted by the amount of slowness they add to IE’s load times, but you can check for yourself and disable the add-ons if you want to. We’ve also got a copy of the chart below.

Disable Add-Ons in IE

We’ve already covered how to manage and troubleshoot add-ons in Internet Explorer, and you should definitely check out that article for a more in-depth look at the subject, but here’s the quick and dirty method


Head to Tools –> Manage Add-ons from the menu:

Once you’re there, you’ll notice a column on the right called “Load time”, which will show how many seconds an add-on is adding to the loading process.

You can select the add-ons and click the Disable button to get rid of them. You’ll probably want to make sure that you’ve changed the drop-down for “Currently loaded add-ons” to “All add-ons” instead.

50 Slowest Popular Add-ons for IE8

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Looking at this chart, if you’re using the AVG Safe Search add-on, your browser is taking an extra second to load. If you’ve got multiple of these add-ons loaded, it could be even worse.

If your browser is really hosed, you should check out our guide to completely resetting Internet Explorer to the default settings, which can fix just about any problem you might have.

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Lowell is the founder and CEO of How-To Geek. He’s been running the show since creating the site back in 2006. Over the last decade, Lowell has personally written more than 1000 articles which have been viewed by over 250 million people. Prior to starting How-To Geek, Lowell spent 15 years working in IT doing consulting, cybersecurity, database management, and programming work.
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