Friday, April 22, 2011

Speed Up Browsing by Disabling Internet Explorer

I had installed Internet Explorer 9.  Now I was getting these completely dumb-assed messages at the bottom of the screen:  "Speed up browsing by disabling add-ons."  The first time, I thought this was a good idea, and I went ahead with that.  When it kept happening, though, I realized I needed to find a way to shut it off.  This post describes how I did that.

One suggestion that came up in my search was to click Disable Addons, on that reminder, and set the reminder time to as high as possible.  It seemed the best one could do was to choose the "Don't Disable" option to be left alone for 30 days.

But I wanted to eliminate this stupid reminder permanently.  A different approach involved making a change in Group Policy settings.  I wasn't sure how to do that, or even to see if I had the option in question, so I ran a search and found a tweaks article that reminded me that I could get into the Local Group Policy Editor via Start > Run > gpedit.msc.

In the policy editor, I didn't see exactly the option described.  The message said to start with the Windows Components area, but there were at least two of those:  one under Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates, and one under User Configuration > Administrative Templates.  I did find Internet Explorer subheadings in both, but neither had a "Disable add-on performance notifications" option.  The advisor told me that I might need to copy updated inetres.admx and inetres.adml files from a machine with IE9 installed, but this machine had IE9 installed already, so that did not seem to apply.

That pretty much exhausted my focused search.  At this time, then, there was no good solution to this problem.  I hoped that the Don't Disable option did indeed give me 30 days of peace.  At the end of that time, it was possible but doubtful (since I rarely used IE, and had just discovered one more reason for that) that I would actually appreciate the reminder.

6 comments:

Mrs Crolla

This nag annoys me unutterably. i've repeated reset the times I want to allow for my addons to start up. It still comes back. I'm using IE9 less and less...

Anonymous

Here's some more information that might be helpful,

IE9 - Stop "Speed up browsing by disabling add-ons"

Pete
PeteNetLive

Anonymous

My current understanding is that one simply cannot turn off "speed up browsing by disabling add-ons". This message is by far the silliest message and/or message-position I've ever come across. How on earth did it pass testing? A non-critical message that appears every single time the browser opens, without any obvious way to control the behaviour!

Anonymous

This is silly. Every user needs to balance the time they spend optimizing versus actually getting stuff done. Your tools shouldn't be forcing you one way or the other.

Samy

Following tutorial from a Microsoft MVP provides detailed instructions to disable this annoying popup notification message:

http://www.askvg.com/how-to-disable-speed-up-browsing-by-disabling-add-ons-popup-notification-message-in-internet-explorer/

It also contains a Registry Editor method for Windows editions which don't come with Group Policy Editor.

raywood

I have looked at the links provided by PeteNetLive and by Samy. Thanks to both for providing potential solutions.

Among the several solutions provided by the latter, the easiest seems to be to just download and run a REG file. I've given that a try. I'm not sure yet whether it works. If I remain silent, it probably means I'm happy.