Internet Explorer - No Add ons

I find that running IE with no add-ons has speeded up my browsing considerably but I notice that one of the add-ons is my anti virus program Avast. Does this mean I am running IE with no anti virus protection or does it still run in the background, covering my browsing?

 

you can do away with the addon and still be covered, it is just an extra option and not really necessary, however, you should not be using IE at all, install firefox or chrome or your choice, but IE is not supported anymore, only use it for those websites that need IE.

 

Hello Bernie,

I fully endorse the advice from Elizabeth23. Install Firefox or Google Chrome. Stay away from Internet Explorer, it is a "junk magnet" among attracting other nasties.

Trouble is even using a current "state of the art" browser old IE still lurks in the background even idle for some reason. It is an idea to - Control Panel/Internet Options/Delete Browsing History and check/tick every box. Clears away the trash.

Quite a few good "Chrome clones" are available. Comodo Dragon is quite good. Even Opera is light years ahead of IE.

There are also many good "Firefox fiesta's" available.

I use Chrome and am happy with it but clear history "from the beginning of time" quite often.

The trouble with IE is that you cannot (as far as I know) remove it as it is an integral part of XP trying to remove may cause severe harm to XP.

If anyone knows how to shut IE down, please let me know.

Cheers,

Aunty Jack.

 

Many thanks both of you. Point taken re IE but I must admit I prefer its simplicity compared to Chrome and Firefox which seem to absorb too much memory for my liking, so am sticking with IE for the time being. Perhaps one day I will give in to the constant pressure to change browsers!!

 

then the next best thing is to run ie in a sandbox, check out sandboxie and/or the sandbox option of 360 Internet security by qihoo.

 

Maybe it's a bad idea because this browser is outdated, too.
But if you are up to save performance while browsing, maybe the old Opera 9 (aviable e.g. on oldversion.com) would be something for you.

On my machine it uses 40 mb ram after a start with no tabs. At the moment its using 167 mb ram with 40 tabs open. And you can disable background-processes from websites by globally disabling java script which also gets you rid of most (annoying) advertisings. But in this case you would have to re-enable it for selected sites because they just need java script. Disabling JS and Flash would also disable alot of ways to silently download and execute viruses - but be aware, it's still old, outdated and infectable (but maybe not as much as IE).

For me it's the fastest browser so far - not in sense of rendering a single highly animated site but in sense of displaying multiple static sites at once and navigating through them.
But for security there is no way around a daily updated browser like firefox, chrome, the latest opera, etc. - even if it eats ram like a hungry cookie monster.