Microsoft's Internet Explorer doesn't tend to get a whole lot of praise in terms of innovation, and despite IE's market share, popular competitors such as Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome tend to hog the headlines.
Hoping to buck the trend, Microsoft's Internet Explorer team has blogged about a largely unknown new feature in IE8 that's both easy to use and very helpful. It's called add-on load time, and, as the name suggests, it can be used to check how long individual add-ons are taking to load.
Useful, if say your tabs are opening unusually slow. If that's the case, there's a good chance that a third-party add-on could be the culprit. To view add-on load times in IE8, open up the browser, click Tools and choose Manage Add-ons. You'll be presented with a screen similar to this:
The highlighted column on the right lists the time taken for installed add ons to load. The provided screen grab shows very quick load times, but Microsoft adds that an add-on bundled with Skype 4.1 is known to take over a second to load. Add that to the load time of all other enabled add-ons, and waiting a few seconds for each tab to open soon becomes painful.
Microsoft reckons that using the tool will allow users to quickly identify the cause of slow downs, and consequently disable or uninstall problematic add-ons.
Not a bad little feature, we reckon, and we'd kinda like to see it become available as a means for tracking down resource-hungry extensions in Firefox.
