I’m running IE8 and I’m fairly happy with it. I really like tabbed browsing and the favorites bar. Also crash recovery is handy. I’ll concede that the initial load is slow, but after that navigation is quick and no problem with transitions. I think your problem is with the accelerator bloatware. I disabled all of them.
if you really want to disable the accelerators feature in IE 8, please perform the following steps.
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Start Internet Explorer 8.
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Click Tools → Internet Options → Advanced
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Then uncheck the box for Display Accelerator button on selection, under Browsing.
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Click Apply and OK.
As far as restricted sites, that’s good for sites known to have hosted malware (these sites have virtually no permissions to anything). But I keep HOST maintained and current.
Periodically I go to Blocking Unwanted Connections with a Hosts File and download the current HOST file. This comes out about every 6 weeks.
This prevents DNS lookup for known malware sites. This also will block a lot of ads. You’ll have a bunch of little windows saying "can’t navigate to page’. All fine and dandy. Except I go one step further: Spybot Search & Desroy v1.6.2. I have everything that it does disabled. The only thing I use it for is its ‘immunize’ feature.
During the immunize process, it adds its own entries into the HOST file. And those entries ALSO get added into the restricted zone. Before I run the Spybot immunize process, I run DelDomains.inf. I can create that file by copy and paste the following content into Notepad.exe and saving as DelDomains.inf:
; DelDomains.inf © 11-28-04 | Revised 01-15-06
; Created by: Mike Burgess Microsoft MVP
; http://mvps.org/winhelp2002/
;
; Warning: Deletes all entries in the Restricted & Trusted Zone list
; http://mvps.org/winhelp2002/restricted.htm
;
; Revised to include the EscDomains key
;
; To execute this file: in Explorer - right-click (this file)
; Select Install from the Menu.
; Note: you will not see any onscreen action.
[version]
signature=“$CHICAGO$”
[DefaultInstall]
DelReg=DelTemps
AddReg=AddTemps
[DelTemps]
HKCU,“Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains”
HKLM,“Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains”
HKCU,“Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Ranges”
HKLM,“Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Ranges”
HKCU,“Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\EscDomains”
; Recreate the keys to avoid a restart
[AddTemps]
HKCU,“Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains”
HKLM,“Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains”
HKCU,“Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Ranges”
HKLM,“Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Ranges”
HKCU,“Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\EscDomains”
What that does is keep your IE restricted sites zone current. You want to run this prior to Spybot immunize after updating its definitions (every two to four weeks).
FWIW, the original HOST file from MVPS contains 14431 entries. After immunizing with Spybot, and additional 15093 entries are added (ALL of which are added into the IE restricted zone). That being said, I have 29521 URLS mapped to 127.0.0.1 as well as 15093 of those URLS in the restricted zone.
No slow IE8 for me on my PIII-1400S w/1024MB of PC133 SDRAM.