nternet explorer 8 brought many useful changes in comparison to IE7. The browser was downloaded by the thousands on its release date. As usual, with a new browser comes a new problem. Not least of which is the slow behavior being reported by users of IE8.

Many reported IE8 being very slow as compared to earlier versions, so much so that many folks just hung onto IE7. In truth, the IE8 browser is more stable and less prone to crashing but slow behavior seems to be an affliction. Firefox users have rallied against the IE8 browser by reporting loading speeds amounting to half the time it takes a web page to load in IE8.

So, what can be done to speed up your IE8 installation – now that you have it?

We all want an internet browser that displays web pages properly in a stabilized environment. People want to customize the browser to fit their personal tastes on the web. It’s not so important to boost security with IE8 as Microsoft have done a much better job here to counteract sites that contain viruses.

Though the tabs are quite slow in loading and reports have shown that there is a difference in speed as compared to Firefox. So, we can tweak the browser a bit.

1. Spybot, if you use it to detect spyware, has an immunization feature that immunizes the pc system against potential threats. It adds thousands of sites to a restricted site list which seems to be problematic in IE8. Disable the internet explorer domain from the Spybot panel and run immunization again.

2. If the tabs are loading very slowly, then re-registering a dll file can help. Open your command prompt, type regsvr32 actxprxy.dll and enter that.

3. Your add-ons may be slowing your IE8 browser. Try disabling all of them from Internet Options. Then, add them back one by one whilst running tests to see how fast web pages are loading. The Skype add-on has been reported as an issue for example. Work through your add-ons, one by one, until slow behavior returns. That way you can identify the offending add-on.

4. Download the IE8 Readiness Toolkit from Microsoft.

It provides control over the browser cleanup tasks such as browsing history, preferences and favorites – items that can slow the loading times.

5. Some browsing speed improvement is possible. Back up your registry first then apply this change:

Go to the registry from regedit in the run box. Then navigate to ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER’. Navigate through Software ->Microsoft->Windows->Current Version->Internet Settings. Change the value to 8 or 10, close the editor and reboot.

With any new browser release, we have to expect issues and usually problems revolve around slow behavior. Try the above and see if it makes a difference to your new browser life.