I had asked you about a problem that I was having with Internet Explorer. Your
response was to “disable add-ons.”
Huh? I have no idea what that means. Please explain.
Fair enough. It’s another one of those things that I take somewhat for
granted.
Ultimately, many problems with Internet Explorer aren’t caused by IE at all. They’re caused by software that’s added to IE to extend its functionality.
Not surprisingly, those are called add-ons.
They sometimes show up without warning, but they’re easily dealt with in
later versions of IE.
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The add-on manager defaults to showing you a list of all installed Toolbars and Extensions:
To disable an add-on, just right-click it and click Disable from the resulting pop-up menu:
Conversely, if the add-on is disabled and you want to enable it, right-click the disabled item and then click Enable in the resulting menu.
What do I disable?
If I’m diagnosing a crash or serious misbehavior problem in IE, I start by disabling everything. That quickly tells me whether the problem is related to an add-on or not.
You can then start enabling add-ons until the misbehavior reappears, and when it does, you’ll have identified the guilty add-on.
If you are not diagnosing a problem but simply trying to trim Internet Explorer’s memory footprint or increase its speed, then I recommend that you:
-
Disable everything that you’re not sure of. Leave enabled only those add-ons that you know or feel you need.
-
As you use Internet Explorer thereafter, enable only those add-ons that are required to provide functionality that you need.
-
Leave everything else disabled.
Finally, if you suspect malware, disable everything that you don’t recognize and do an internet search for the names that you find listed.
And of course, be sure to run up-to-date anti-malware tools. IE add-ons are one way that machines can become infected.
Or you can do Start, Run and type in iexplore.exe -extoff. I’ve saved it as a shortcut on my desktop so when IE8 in all it’s glory starts giving me fits, I can just click on the icon and run it w/o the add-ons. Love your Windows safety book, by the way!
“In IE 9, click the gear icon “
Oh ! So THAT’s what it is ! I thought it was a flower…. I’ve never used it !
Thanks for the educating article on add-ons; In managing add-ons in the left pane “add-on types is a catagory “”tracking protection” which needs explanaton. It offers an option to download a tracking list from the internet and this takesyou to a site “Internet Explorer Gallery” which has several lists to choose from. When would you use this option and how do you select the best list; also does ths block sites on the list who do not respond to a do not track signal?
Terri wrote: “Or you can do Start, Run and type in iexplore.exe -extoff.”
I think Win7 has a way to launch IE without extensions and and-ons. I think it’s under Accessories. (System Tools, perhaps?)
@Schnazola
As far as I know, the only way to run IE without extensions is with the iexplore.exe -extoff command.
If you want to access that without using Run, you can right click on a copy of the IE shortcut and select Properties from the pulldown. Then under the General tab where is says Target, add -extoff to the end of the line so that it says something like “C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe” -extoff
This shortcut will now run IE without any extensions. You may want to create a copy of the original IE shortcut as you’d probably would want to run IE with the extensions at least sometimes.
How do I do this in windows xp professional
28-Dec-2011
@Pat
It would be the same. It depends on the version of IE.
It sounds like there’s no down-side to disabling add-ons :)…is that right?
So, if I disable all of the add-ons, will I be prompted by certain web pages to ENABLE them when they’re needed? Will it be obvious which ones I want to keep enabled?
13-Nov-2012
I did read the article, and I’m wondering if an IE addon could be causing my problem. I’m no longer able to hear audio on youtube, when using IE. It appears to be muted, but when I click on the x (mute) to toggle it, the x does not go away. I can hear anything that is NOT from You Tube, so it’s not my speakers, and I used to be able to hear YouTube using IE. Could this be caused by an IE add on? (I CAN hear YouTube audio when using Google Chrome, but I prefer IE for everything else, and it’s a pain to have to be switching back and forth.)