My World Thru A Web Browser: How To Speed Up Internet Explorer 9: The Ultimate Guide

The Internet Explorer 9 is a light-weight browser that is already blazing fast. If you want to make it even faster here are some great tips how to speed up the Internet Explorer 9.

Hi there! This guide is intended to give you some basic instructions how to speed up the Internet Explorer 9 and your internet connection in general. If you find it useful, I would appreciate it if you would take a few seconds to bookmark it on a popular site like digg.com, stumbleupon.com or your favorite forums. Thank you.

1. Don’t Check For New Versions Of Cached Sites

The Internet Explorer 9 regularly checks for newer versions of your stored sites. If you visit a lot of sites, IE9 is synchronizing a lot of websites. This can greatly slow down your browser. So, if you want to speed up the Internet Explorer, I would recommend to only check for newer versions of stored pages when you start the browser. This is based on a recommendation by support.microsoft.com. Keep in mind that cached sites also speed up browsing speed, but what is actually slowing down your browser is when it checks for new versions of that site whenever you visit it. So, let’s change that behavior and speed up the loading speed.

1. To do that, click on the gears icon and then on Internet Options.
2. Under Browsing History, click on Settings:

Internet Explorer 9 Browsing History Settings

3. Next, either select Every time I start Internet Explorer or Never

Tip: If you don’t want to sync cached pages at all, it is better to select Never.
Pro Tip: You may enhance your browsing speed by storing the cache on your fastest drive, for example a SSD (Solid State Drive). Also for faster video buffering (Youtube) you may want to increase the disk space used for temp files to 250MB.

2. Speed Up IE9 By Disabling Add-Ons & Toolbars

You can speed up Internet Explorer 9 by disabling extensions and add-ons. Some extensions are particular slow and you will notice quite a boost after disabling them. So, check your list of extensions carefully and disable all extensions that you don’t need or use infrequently.
Click here to learn how to disable add-ons in Internet Explorer 9
Click here to learn how to disable toolbars in Internet Explorer 9

3. Pro Tip: Increase MaxConnectionsPerServer

What is the MaxConnectionsPerServer value? That value determines how many simultaneous connections your browser makes to download files from a server. When the browser is using a low value, you can increase this value to speed up your internet connection. Every browser is using its own value, however you can increase this value in the registry and your browser (IE9 in our case) will use that value instead.
Unfortunately, I was not able to figure out what default value the new Internet Explorer 9 uses (please reply if you know the default value), but I suppose it uses a value of around 6-8 connections per server.

How to increase max connections in Windows 7

Alternative: Manually Editing Registry

1. Open the registry editor. Enter regedit.exe into the search field on your Start menu
2. Uncollapse HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings
3. Right-click in the right pane (last entry at the bottom should be ZonesSecurityUpgrade) and create a new DWORD registry key:

4. Enter MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server as the name.
5. Create another DWORD key (same as above) and give it the value MaxConnectionsPerServer
6. Double-click on the key MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server and enter the value 12
7. Repeat the last step for MaxConnectionsPerServer
8. Reboot

4. Remove Favorites From Internet Explorer 9

A large number of favorites can affect your browsing speed. You might want to export your favorites and then delete the most of them. Honestly, favorites are not a good way to manage things. I prefer to write a note to it to find what I want. To do that I use tools like Roboform.

Remove favorites to speed up Internet Explorer 9

5. Speed Up Frequent Tasks By Adding Accelerators To IE9

One of the best and unique features of Internet Explorer 8 and 9 are accelerators.
What are accelerators?
Accelerators are a great way to get things done more quickly! Let’s say you want to translate this site, then you’d normally have to open up something like Babylon or microsofttranslator.com and enter the website URL there. With accelerators you can do that with just one click. This won’t really speed up the Internet Explorer 9, but it will be speed up the part of getting things done.
The IE-Addons gallery is filled with useful accelerators. You will surely find a lot of useful accelerators in Microsoft’s gallery ieaddons.com
Tip: Unfortunately, too many accelerators can also slow down IE9. So, only enable accelerators that you really need.