Why is my IE8 so much slower than my Firefox?

tallyho8 · Apr 6, 2010

I have Windows XP on my computer with both Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox browsers. My Internet Explorer seemed like it was slowing down a lot for web browsing so I upgraded to IE8 and it is still just as slow.

I downloaded Firefox and it is much quicker especially on sites like my weather.com and zap2it TV listings.

I have used a couple of malware programs like Spyware Doctor on my computer with no improvement.

I know I should probably stay with Firefox since it works so well, but I am interested in finding out why my IE8 is so slow. It is fast on my wife's computer.

BigE_ · Apr 7, 2010

Take the cache size down to 50MB and it will speed up. Empty the cache, too. Also, get rid of any add ons like search bars, ie pro, etc.

ragkar · Apr 7, 2010

Perhaps it's due to another program, like a virus scanner, that is intercepting your d/l using ie. But it doesn't do this for firefox.
Take a look at your options.
I recently looked at a woman's laptop. She was concerned that she wasn't virus scanning. I informed her that she has virus scanned 125 times since she bought the laptop three months ago. And AVG has checked the database version every four hours since then. It was a bit too much. At her request I changed update and scanning to on-demand.

BigE_ · Apr 7, 2010

Oh - one other thing. How much memory does your computer have vs. your wife's? IE8 takes a TON of memory. My wife left her computer on with IE8 up and running. The only page it was on was the Google home page. After 3 days, it was sucking up 1.5GB of memory (including virtual memory). This was on a computer with only 384MB of RAM. Horrible, horrible memory leaks on IE.

Yeah, and Firefox has memory leak problems as well, just not as bad.

LostInTheWoods · Apr 7, 2010

For an even faster browser, try Google Chrome. I found it significantly faster the IE, and even faster than Firefox. I like the layout and functionality of Chrome the best, but that's just a personal preference.

mostly_gas · Apr 7, 2010

Beside having plenty of memory, the video driver can be often overlooked. See if there is an updated driver, or consider a faster video card. When I tried IE8 on my laptop video driver revolted. Removed IE8 and all is well.:thumbsup: