Tuesday, August 12, 2008

IE7 slow to open - fix?

I was so annoyed at IE7 opening so slow as application as well as when creating new tabs for quite some time, things were more obvious on ASUS R2H due to lack of power - it was taking a couple of seconds to open a new tab. Then it struck me, why not have a look at the installed browser add-ons, maybe one of them was slowing it down... And I was right, once I disabled SSVHelper Class BHO (ssv.dll) IE7 starts and opens new tabs much quicker!!! I feel bad for blaming IE guys a few posts back...


I couldn't find much information about SSVHelper, other than being part of the Sun JRE (1.5 and greater), but nothing specific about it. I'm not running Java applets very often and if I'll find they don't work, I'll just keep it in mind and enable it back when needed.

Update 18 November 2008

There is an easier way to check whether the add-ons are slowing the IE7 startup; go to Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools and run Internet Explorer (No Add-ons) - if that's starting quickly then you need to review the addons and disable anything that you don't need.


6 comments :

  1. Had same problem - thanks for post!!

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  2. i'm glad it helped :-) just updated the post on how to start IE with no addons, might be helpful next time.

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  3. thanks, IE was quick to open for me, but it always snagged for a few seconds waiting for the google toolbar to display and allow me to actually use it

    i disabled java's helper and it seemed to load much quicker

    never noticed that IE load w/o addons before, nice

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  4. Jared,

    I've never used the Google Toolbar - you should try Google Chrome, you might be surprised how fast it is and it displays websites pretty much like IE, although it doesn't support ActiveX controls. You could use IE for certain websites and Google Chrome for casual browsing.

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  5. SSV was TOTALLY my problem. And my teammate's at work. We probably picked up that helper loading stuff to work on Java/JSF stuff at home.

    Thanks for sharing the tip!

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  6. @Joy
    ssv.dll seems to be part of both Sun's JRE and JDK installations, so you are correct. My pleasure.

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