A client recently complained of extreme slowness in his computer, especially when browsing the Internet. Now, as many of you know, that is a possible sign of a malware infection and the client correctly suspected so. And so did I at first. A thorough check with specialized detection tools and detailed running programs analysis revealed… nothing. So with that possibility out of the way, I just went down the list of other possible reasons for the problem. The computer itself was not very fast, but even so the browsing was excruciatingly slow.

I checked the internet connection speed, which at some point had been a problem in the past. But not anymore, speed was very decent. The default browser was Mozilla Firefox, and although that’s not the fastest browser, it is at least faster than Internet Explorer (in case you’re wondering, as of this writing Chrome and Opera are the fastest). So I decided to look into the browser’s installed plug-ins (in general terms, plug-ins are small additions to a larger program that enable certain additional functions). I directed the client to use Firefox without ANY plug-ins running, and the speed change result was instantaneous and considerable. So we had the general area to address.

Rather than trying to find out which individual plug-ins were slowing the browser down to then proceed to disable them, I tried a different approach: I got ALL the plug-ins disabled, and enabled only the couple that were absolutely needed for the browser to function properly. At the end of that the browser was still quite faster than before.

Therefore, if your browser is slow as hell and pages take forever to load, providing your computer is not from 2000 or you use Internet Explorer ( 🙂 ), has no malware infection or a really slow internet connection (read this on how to test your internet connection speed), this is something you might want to look into, for this is one of the cases where less is more.