Disable Video ActiveX Controls in Internet Explorer on the Fly

One of my customers complained to me about the "slow Internet" on her Windows XP SP3 machine, which was running Internet Explorer (IE) 8.0. Internet speedtests showed no problem, so I looked into the kinds of websites she was visiting and noticed all the Adobe Flash content. These days, it's hard to findwebsites that don't have video ads.

I realized that the video ads were likely the cause of the problem, so I decided to disable videos in the browser. My first attempt was to simply clearIE's Play animations in web pages check box. (This check box is in the Multimedia section on the Advanced tab of the Internet Options page, whichyou access through the Tools menu.) When that didn't work as expected, I did a little research and found that this setting affects only animated GIF files.

After doing even more research, I discovered that there are a few fast and easy tweaks you can make to improve users' Internet experience and productivityon older, slower systems (e.g., Windows Vista, XP) that use IE 8.0 or IE 9.0. These tweaks will also help with network bandwidth utilization.

Here's what you need to do:

With this technique, you can disable videos (and other add-ons) quickly and on the fly, without exiting IE. If you want to see active video in your IEsession again, just go back to the Manage Add-ons dialog box, enable the ActiveX controls, and use the F5 key to refresh the web page.

If manually disabling the ActiveX controls isn't feasible, you can implement this technique with Group Policy. For information on how to do so, see the Windows IT Pro article "Managing Windows Vista Group Policy Options" (March 2007) and the Microsoft article " How to manage Internet Explorer add-ons in Windows XP Service Pack 2."