Remove all Restricted Sites in IE8

Hi folks!

Still extremely happy with the Comodo CIS, not one single glitch! Absolutely GREAT, THANKS! :slight_smile:

Not so happy with a browser ‘Upgrade’. Since Microsoft blackmailed their faithful customers to dump Internet Explorer 6 and install a new ‘Safer’ version I finally broke down & installed IE8. Pathetic doesn’t describe it, ‘horror story’ comes close but still lacks, what a pile of software garbage! I’d need dozens of pages to describe how bad it is on my machine. Designed by imbeciles. It takes 3 - 10 times as long to load pages on the internet, if it loads them at all. That’s real serious because nothing but dialup is available to me. Average page load time from site to site is 1.5 - 2 minutes PER PAGE! Not unusual to wait 3-4 minutes for a page transition if not longer!!!

In searching for some solutions to speed up this horrid IE8 browser I came across a program download to instantly remove all ‘Restricted Sites’ from IE8 Security zones. It’s located here: http://ie8slow.com/

My question is: does Comodo Firewall already protect me from such dangerous sites? Seems to me your security software is in place for just that reason, to protect from dangerous website content. According to info on this removal program it instantly removes all Restricted Sites all at once and really speeds up IE8 for every page loading. I don’t want to use it if it’s dangerous to remove these sites from Restricted Sites zone.

Thanks for any info!
JimmieD

Hi,

Maybe you should give a try to one of the 2 Comodo secure browsers : Dragon and Ice Dragon instead of using IE.

Thanks for a very speedy reply!

I did try Firefox but wasn’t happy with it overall, plus I couldn’t get it to fully function without enebling ‘Accept 1st Party Cookies’. I don’t want to allow whatever garbage any site wants to dump on me in their cookies and of course it’s tiresome and frustrating going back continuously trying to delete bad cookies and figure out which ones are okay.

I’ve thought about Dragon or Ice Dragon and I’ll do some more research there, that may be the best answer. It’s hard to imagine it could ever be worse than IE8!

In the meantime I need to find out about these Restricted Sites until I can switch to another browser like Dragon or Ice Dragon.

Thanks!

Is my computer at risk if I remove the sites in my ‘Restricted Sites’ zones in Internet Explorer? Filtering through al these causes serious slowdown of IE8 and I see it recommended by M/S and others to remove them. Am I safe if I do??

Thanks!

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.

  1. Start Internet Explorer 8.

  2. Click Tools → Internet Options → Advanced

  3. Then uncheck the box for Display Accelerator button on selection, under Browsing.

  4. 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.

Thanks, WxMan! I appreciate you taking the time for that! I’ll see how all that works out.

I used to use Spybot but suspected some conflicts, uninstalled. Also used Super-Antispyware but that’s gone too. In trying to get IE8 to work all I have left is Malwarebytes and CIS. I even disabled Java and Adobe Flash Add-ons. still s-l-o-w-w-w.

For me the IE8 takes over 10 times as long to transition and load pages as IE6. Often at 5 minutes the page still hasn’t showed up, blank screen! Have to refresh and wait another 3-4 minutes. With IE6 it was an average of 20 - 30 seconds, not 2 - 5 MINUTES. Also get errors, ‘Internet Explorer cannot open/display this…’ When page is half loaded or without loading, hit refresh again and it displays.

Favorites is the most irritating of all. When I want to ‘Add to Favorites’ it takes 1-2 minutes for the drop down to open after I click on Add to Favorites. Then I find that ALL folders are opened, making the task far more difficult.

Not only that but the drop-down window hierachy is all ■■■■■■■ up: instead of all Main Folders being on a geographic line an equal distance from left margin it instead randomly shifts over, so that Main folders [which aren’t identified as such by any highlighting, underlining or anything else] then merge over to the line that subfolders or sub-sub-folders are on, so you can’t even distinguish and instantly pick out Main folders! This means spending 2,3,5 or 6 minutes searching for a folder by reading each title and finally finding object, opening to add a website! 20 years of Favorites to search through!

The Add to Favorites thing just can’t be an ‘Oh, woops’, it’s far too obnoxious. This had to show up as a potential problem in pre-release testing. Somehow Microsoft okayed this malware for all their customers knowing how irritating it is and refuses to do a Fix, even though there’s hundreds upon hundreds of complaints to them about it. That by itself is enough for me to finally leave Microsoft and all their junk bloatware problem programs.

Glad it works for you, sure doesn’t for me!

THANKS for your help!!!

You don’t need anything but CIS. Malwarebytes is good to have installed when you need an on demand scanner (after being infested). Disable Malwarebyte’s real-time protections (keep the defs and engine up to date).

I used to have all that junk running, e.g. Ad-Aware, Spybot and MS malware thngy. I got rid of all of 'em. I do not know how you installed IE8, i.e., standalone or MS update. It sounds like something is corrupt in your IE sub-system.

First off: what’s the hugest CPU hog on your system? Once you boot, terminate all the ocean lowering, global warming, cancer/gravity wave, et ali, apps you’ve got running in the background. Now: and tick the performance tab. Click on the CPU column twice such that highest CPU goes to the top. What’s running at the top?

IF System Idle Process is at the top we can progress to the next step.

My suspiciion would be either IE, CMDAgent, CFP, or some other process is sucking off your CPU’s efforts at manliness. If you have a better CPU than my PIII 1400 I’m going to bet your life somehting else is afoot.

My skills are limited on these whirly grindy computer thingies so apologies up front. I started out with IBM punch card machines and got confused shortly after that. Good to hear that CIS is all I need! Mine’s the freebie Malwarebytes which I don’t think includes Real Time, but I’ll double check.

My current ride is XP-Pro Sp3 on a Dell Dimension 3000 with 2.80Ghz -2.79Ghz P4 processor, 768Mg’s Ram.

I did the M/S suggested method of ‘Upgrade’ in order to successfully save Favorites and Outlook Express phone lists from IE6. I disabled everything but the power cord for install, as clean as I could get it. Added all M/S Updates & patches immediately after rebooting twice after install, then rebooted twice more and defragged with IOBit Smart Defrag.

I’ll have to do the CPU usage check later tonight. I don’t know what all is running when it boots, dont know where to check. The Startup programs are bewildering to me, don’t know what or how to disable stuff. Looking at Task Manager Processes it shows 00 CPU for everything but cfp.exe at 02 and System Idle at 88-99 fluctuating. At bottom it says CPU Usage 2%.

3 incidences of svchost running, 1 is Local Service, 1 Network Service, 1 System, with total of 36 Processes shown.

Still have a great old P-III machine [I think 966Mhz?] in storage, fine setup but architecture couldn’t handle enough memory, loved it though! May get her going again one day…

THANKS for the help!

Whirly grindy computer thingies…

;D

Funny! I used to run an Amdahl V8 dual-CPU (128 + 127 channel) mainframe back in 1984.

Ah, when a ‘mainframe’ was truly a mainframe!

I got started back when pterodactyls were still an occasional problem. My first ‘computer’ was in the form of a gift when I was maybe 12 or 13? It was a little car, roughly the size of a shoebox, with electric motors and a highly advanced directional system for the times. Small cardboard pre-punched cards were inserted under the chassis and the fully mechanical interface [almost similar to a music box mechanism] caused inputs to the steering mechanism and motors so that it would drive around according to these ‘pre-programmed’ routes, start, stop, reverse, figure eights and several other courses. This was at the dawn of the computer age. I hopped up the motors so it would do burnouts…

My dad ran something new and exciting, a ‘Computerized Data Processing Records Center’ back in the 60’s. Used cardboard punch cards and a strange and massive typewriter-to-‘printer’ hole-puncher machine that inserted binary code onto cards. These were gobbled up by a huge monster, ‘The Machine’, and ‘Automated Data Processing’ was born haaa! One ‘Computer’ took up all of a gymnasium-sized room. I worked in the computer industry some time later but then got hurt and lost some abilities, now challenged by ‘Point & Click’ and back to sub-square one.