Change in Toolbar Management

Internet Explorer 8 now allows users to more easily manage their toolbars and add-ons. Feedback from Internet Explorer 7 users clearly indicated that there is a need for easier management of toolbar and add-ons.

Our IE7 user feedback showed that less experienced users had problems with hiding toolbars to free up browser screen real estate, or to get rid of a toolbar that they no longer wanted. More experienced users understood that any toolbar and add-on that runs in a browser will have an impact on browser startup time, new tab creation time, and navigation speed and they wanted an easier way to manage the set of add-ons that actually run.

In Internet Explorer 7 most users used the Tools - Toolbars menu to hide a toolbar; or they used the browser frame context (right-click) menu. Although this hides the toolbar user interface, the toolbar add-on's code actually continues to run and Internet Explorer 7 still loaded the toolbar add-on every time the user opened the browser or a new tab, thus still affecting performance.

To hide and disable a toolbar add-on in Internet Explorer 7, a user had to click Manage Add-ons on the Tools menu, then click Enable or Disable Add-ons, and then, in the Manage Add-ons dialog box, click on the toolbar's name and select Disable. In addition, because a lot of toolbars consist of two or more related add-ons that plug into Internet Explorer, the Manage Add-ons dialog box might display several entries for a toolbar, and the user might have to disable them as well. Thus, few Internet Explorer 7 users completely hid and disabled a toolbar, neutralizing its effect on performance.

Improvements in Internet Explorer 8

Internet Explorer 8 makes it easy for users to be in full control of their IE add-ons. Clicking the new Close button next to a toolbar opens the Disable Add-on dialog box:

This dialog box shows that the toolbar consists of three add-ons: the visible toolbar, and any toolbar helper add-ons . The user has a choice to clear the option under ‘Related add-ons that will also be disabled’. In addition, clicking the Disable button will cause Internet Explorer to disable both types of add-ons and to free its resources for faster browsing.

We also (with the instruction at the bottom of the dialog) tell users how to get their toolbar back. (Sometimes users want to only temporarily hide a toolbar, to maximize the browser screen real estate on a certain site.)

The same dialog box may appear as follows:

 

In this case, Internet Explorer has also found two other add-ons by the same publisher that the user may want to disable. Some installations of toolbars do not group all related components, so users are given the option to disable all browser add-ons from the same publisher.

Findings

Enabling toolbars is just as important as disabling them. Our research showed that users don’t have any issues with figuring out how to show the toolbar again – Just like in IE7, an IE8  user can enable a toolbar again by clicking the Tools button, and then clicking the desired toolbar from the Toolbar menu. Or, they can use the browser frame context (right-click) menu. When a toolbar is enabled, all the related components can also be enabled.

All these user experience changes tested very well in our IE8 usability studies: Users were delighted to discover that they can now disable or enable exactly the right set of toolbars and add-ons – keeping them in control of their browser.

Frank Olivier
Program Manager

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 09, 2009
  I really liked the new management console for add-ons. It took me a little bit of time to get used to, and I imagine it will be tweaked over the years, but it looks very stable and usable. Excellent job of figuring out which add-ons are related - that was the most confusing thing for me when trying to disable add-ons in IE7. It would be nice if this were even easier somehow.

• Anonymous
  March 09, 2009
  While I do like IE8 and use it now as my main browser - using it with additional Toolbars results in horrible performance. I'm using the IE browser in build 7000 of Windows 7 so perhaps there have been improvements since then, however with no toolbars IE runs quite fast - add in a couple like Windows Live toolbar and everything slows down dramatically. Also the left-hand 'close' button looks ugly, couldnt it have been a little more discreet? grays or something

• Anonymous
  March 09, 2009
  Want to talk about toolbar management? Let's talk custom GUI which IE still sorely lacks. If I can't do this then it's not customizable... http://img175.imageshack.us/img175/3019/ie8betterguier2.png

• Anonymous
  March 09, 2009
  I have two suggestions: 1 Make the new toolbar close button optional (by a setting) because the button consumes screen-real estate, especially if you have more than one toolbar it gets ugly 2 Add a maximize button for the Manage add-ons dialog

• Anonymous
  March 09, 2009
  @ JAB3: personally, I miss IE6's UI flexibility, which is one of the reasons why I switched to Firefox: in the latter, I can put buttons right aside the menu bar, meaning that the UI actually fits on 3 lines:

• menu+navigation
• tools (Google PR + all 16 Developer Tools icons) and Search
• tabs Meaning that on a wide screen, space waste (as shown in your screen capture) is minimal. @MSIE team, I'd like to suggest a shortcut for IE 8, building upon this feature: when right-clicking a toolbar, one ever present option should be 'Plugin Properties', that would open that toolbar's entry in the Extension manager. Associative action: do things in one single click.

• Anonymous
  March 09, 2009
  IE sorely needs to rethink its GUI altogether. The idea of putting the address bar at the very top, blended with the title bar, is very nice in an IE6 kind of way, where you still didn't have tabs. Now that you do have tabs, the address bar just became completely disjointed from what it's controlling. The address bar and the back-forward buttons belong inside the tab, because that's what they refer to. Chrome really did it right with how they implemented this, and I feel bad knowing that MS won't implement something similar out of fear of scaring the users with too much change, and just because it wasn't their idea. Even though it would work so well with the new tab colour grouping. The colour outlines would look so much better over the title bar black.

• Anonymous
  March 10, 2009
  Toolbars and IE have a horrible history and it is only worse now in IE8. I'm glad to see that you can disable the toolbar in an easier fashion now (IF! it is visible - keep in mind most spyware crud that gets installed tries very hard not to be seen) But the problem is worse due to this bug: https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=410121 Which is correct in stating that it is almost impossible to DELETE an addon in IE.  Which in today's software world is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE. How should it be handled? Easy, check out how easy it is in Firefox. http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/1458/addonuninstall.png You simply view the addon list, find the one you want to uninstall, Click Uninstall, Done. But lets face it, the IE chrome/interface is so drastically in need of an overhaul it isn't funny anymore. Internet Options > Advanced > scroll that list baby! Is 80 (Eighty!) items to hard to scroll and find something with such a small window? you bet! no problem, just stretch the dialog - oh wait, NO! you can't do that! why would you want to make the dialog useful? Or how about security settings for each of FOUR different security zones? There's only like 175! items in that list! If you seriously care about the end user experience, this has to be the #1 priority in IE9.

• Anonymous
  March 10, 2009
  Bazzlad: You can put the menu on the top.  There's a registry setting to do it.  I agree it should be an option and you shouldn't have to tweak the registry; but it is possible.

• Anonymous
  March 10, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 10, 2009
  @Mitch 74 Also I think if you copy the IE6 executable and copy it to an IE7 (haven't tried this with IE8) you can use IE6's GUI with IE7's rendering engine however you won't have access to the newer GUI controls to obvious things such as tab features.

• Anonymous
  March 10, 2009
  I have a small resolution (1024 by 768) and I have the Windows Live Toolbar enabled because I use it a lot. When I enable the Favorites bar it kinda makes things very cramped. I wish there was an option to place the 'Favorites Bar' beside the Favorites (Feeds, History) button. When I drag the toolbar within that area, it goes to the right of the tab.

• Anonymous
  March 10, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 10, 2009
  Hold on. Don't you need to run the (disabled) add-on to find out what toolbars does it provide?

• Anonymous
  March 10, 2009
  While this can only be considered LONG overdue, I can see waves of "average users" being confused by the x, disabling, not being able to re-enable them, becoming frustrated, and complaining. This is a good feature to have for the "average users" IMO. Hope their complaining doesn't see it revoked and see cause for a plus button on what is becoming a more tidy interface. It'll make it a lot quicker to fix spammy malware toolbars I find on seemingly every PC users computer.

• Anonymous
  March 10, 2009
  I don't believe it for a second but this story had me smiling from ear to ear at just the idea of IE end-of-life'ing. http://weblog.infoworld.com/enterprisedesktop/archives/2009/03/is_version_8_th.html Best read I had all year! I couldn't care less which engine is used as long as ActiveX and the legacy of bad standards support is over. Dan

• Anonymous
  March 10, 2009
  @Roman - as discussed previously on this blog, disabling IE Addons DOES NOT remove them from startup and being loaded, it just means they aren't used (bad architectural decision). Hopefully MSFT comes around before IE8 ships and (a) makes them NOT load AT all, and (B) provides a REAL way to uninstall them and properly disable them in a simple manner. Dan

• Anonymous
  March 10, 2009
  Dan, I don't know where you get your info, but disabled add-ons are NOT loaded by the browser. As for your InfoWorld 'article', it's pretty clear that the author didn't bother doing any homework.  Even the minimal amount of fact-checking would immediately reject all of the theories that were put forth. Of course, if you got paid only when people visited your site, you'd make stuff up too.  Tabloid journalism.

• Anonymous
  March 10, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 10, 2009
  Hey Now, The changes are good. Thx 4 the info, Catto

• Anonymous
  March 11, 2009
  @The-Real-Dan - Are you sure? because that isn't what I've heard from MSFT. IF I load up IE8 without addons... iexplore.exe -extoff Then go into my Addon management... Tada! I see all kinds of addons listed, many enabled, many with load times listed. In IE7 is was even more obvious because there was a drop down for "currently loaded" addons, in which (again) ALL addons were listed, unless a user specifically turned one off during that session. Do your homework before posting.

• Anonymous
  March 11, 2009
  You should put that off switch in a toolbar, so we can turn IE off more easily.  

• Anonymous
  March 11, 2009
  @Dan: I'm not sure what you've heard, but you've misunderstood the Manage Addons UI.  That's understandable-- it's not super-clear and there are important subtleties to it. When you load IE in no-addons mode, and look in the Manage Addons UI, you will see the addons which are disabled and enabled globally.  This should NOT be taken as an indication that the Enabled addons are currently loaded in the -ExtOff instance. Q: Why does the UI work like this?   A: A key scenario for the -ExtOff mode is to allow users to go disable problematic addons.  If we always showed ALL addons as "disabled" in the MAO UI while in -ExtOff mode, that task would be harder to accomplish. Q: What about the Load Time column? A: The "Load time" column reflects the average load time of the extension across all browser sessions where the addon was actually loaded.   The Load Time column is not blank/hidden in -ExtOff mode.

• Anonymous
  March 11, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 11, 2009
  I am running ie8 rc1 in xp sp2 ie crashes when I hover my mouse over the search results for a video in live serach. live search attempts to play a part of the video clip,I think it's at this point that ie crashes. No issue with other browsers when attempting this (firefox) -hd

• Anonymous
  March 12, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 12, 2009
  @EricLaw[MSFT], if the addons are trully disabled in no-ext mode, why does it take just as long to load and a long time to open new tabs? I would expect the load time to be dramatically better if I'm loading without these addons turned on. As a final question when I am looking at my addons in no-ext mode why are all the Remove/Delete addons disabled?  Surely if I am loading in no addon mode it is because an addon is acting up and I want to remove it.  I haven't looked but I presume that the addons can all be removed when IE is loaded normally. Dan

• Anonymous
  March 12, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2009
  I use McAfee SiteAdvisor with IE8. But the SiteAdvisor toolbar uses up a seperate row. I tried to put it in the same row as the Favorites Bar but could not do so. In IE7 I could place the toolbar in the same row as the Links Bar. Why has this been changed?

• Anonymous
  March 14, 2009
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 16, 2009
  @Dan: The same thing happens with Firefox too, so I guess it's not a browsers' fault. By the way sometimes only administrators can remove addons.