In a previous post I mentioned ways to speed up IE8. For me, having used Spybot a long time ago proved to be the culprit: it had added a slew of sites (hundreds) to the blocked sites zone. I removed it and all was well..

Or was it?

I noticed that IE8 still did not come up as quick as it did on my other computers. Opening a tab was fast, but opening another tab proved to be slow. Actually, I found that the first tab I opened was fast, the next one was slow, the following was fast again. Possibly some pre-creation of processes going on?

Today I finally did the smart thing and hooked up filemon to see what was actually going on. It turns out that there were still hundreds of domains somewhere hidden in my registry. They no longer showed up in any dialog box concerning security, but they were there! I removed the key and now IE8 is really fast. As in, faster than Chrome or Firefox, when opening new tabs. Incredible!

So, if you feel that IE8 is still a bit sluggish for you, go and see what the following registry key contains:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains

(Note that I’m on a x64 machine, hence the WOW64 node).

My solution is to delete the Domains key.

(I can’t even convey how happy I am with this simple find. We all spend a lot of our time inside our browser and I like IE8 better than other browsers. It is just a very capable and well-thought-out user experience. But if something is slow, it kills the experience!)