Internet Explorer 9 looks to be a real contender in the web browser market. The developers have revealed lots of technical information for tech savvy users and web developers but little is known about general features that will be added to Internet Explorer 9.

Recently documents of the Ecosystem Forum II conference have found their way online, and one of the documents reveals that Internet Explorer 9 will monitor add-on performance.

Internet Explorer 9 will inform the user if add-ons are slowing down the browsing experience. A notification is displayed at the top of the web page below the other Internet Explorer UI elements whenever that happens.

The notification contains a button that takes the user directly to the list of enabled add-ons. This page lists the add-ons that are enabled and their loading time. Here it is possible to disable selected or all add-ons.

The same menu provides configuration options to change when this warning appears in Internet Explorer.

Monitoring add-on performance is something that many Firefox users have been waiting for, which is understandable considering the popularity of Firefox browser add-ons.

The Internet Explorer Beta is planned for August 2010. The beta will be the first release with full IE functionality.

Update: Internet Explorer 9 has been released in the meantime. It is available only for Windows Vista and Windows 7, and not Windows XP. The new performance advisor in Internet Explorer will pop up automatically when the browser is opened and at least one add-on exceeds the default load threshold of 0.2 seconds.

Microsoft then displays a notification to the user with options to disable add-ons. If that option is selected, a list of add-ons is displayed that exceed the load threshold. It is then possible to disable one, multiple or all add-ons, or change the load time threshold in a pull down menu.

The add-ons are enabled by default and can be accessed and managed in the Manage Add-Ons section of Internet Explorer that users can open by clicking on Tools > Manage Add-Ons (in Internet Explorer 8, might vary in other versions of the Internet browser).

The main screen in Manage Add-ons provides the ability to enable or disable add-ons but no direct option to remove, delete or uninstall the selected Internet Explorer add-on.

There are three options to delete Internet Explorer add-ons. The first is via the Windows Control Panel where some add-ons are listed if they have been installed individually.

The second option is to configure add-ons in the software program that has installed them.

The most common option however is to remove the add-ons directly in the Manage Add-Ons screen. This can be done by right-clicking an add-on and selecting the More Information option in the context menu.

The More Information screen will then display additional information about the add-on including the websites the add-on is enabled on. Buttons are provided at the bottom to remove the add-on for all sites or only for the selected sites. If all sites are removed the add-on is removed from Internet Explorer.

The procedure does not work the same way for default add-ons and add-ons installed by other software programs. Default extensions can be removed so that they do not function on any site but they will continue to appear in the add-on manager. Some add-ons cannot be removed this way at all. It is however theoretically possible to remove the file responsible on the operating system to uninstall it completely.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 introduced a set of new features (accelerators and web slices) that fall into the add-on category as well. The following article contains 8 sleeper Internet Explorer add-ons that can be useful for the majority of Internet Explorer 8 users.

We would also like to point out that this is already the second article about Internet Explorer 8 add-ons and that the first can be accessed at this link. (read: 10 Useful Internet Explorer Add-ons).

First a quick explanation about the different types of add-ons for Internet Explorer:

• Accelerators: Provide functionality directly on the website.
• Web Slices: Real time information that are displayed in Internet Explorer.
• Search Providers: These add-ons add new search engines to the web browser.

1. Job Search (Accelerator)

Will search for a selected job on thousands of websites including newspapers, job boards and company career pages.

2. Tweet Internet Explorer

Twitter add-on for Internet Explorer 8 that adds a button to the toolbar which, when pressed, opens a popup window that allows to post status updates to Twitter.

3. Xmarks Synchronization

Synchronize favorites and bookmarks across multiple computers.

4. Post To LiveJournal

Makes it possible to quickly post to LiveJournal using the selected text on another website.

5. New York Times Latest News

Quick access to the latest news (titles, videos and excerpts) that have been posted on the New York Times website.

6. Find on Last.fm

Will search for the selected text on the popular music community portal Last.fm

7. LastPass Password Manager

LastPass is an online password manager that provides access to interesting features like password generation. It is available for multiple web browsers.

8. Open It Online Lite

Open documents, spreadsheets and presentations online with this useful Internet Explorer add-on.

Do you know of any add-ons for the Internet Explorer web browser that are worth mentioning? Let us know in the comments.