Removing add-ons from Internet Explorer
With the so-called leak of IE9’s UI (incredibly old screenshots from between Platform Preview 1 & 2), I saw a lot of comments on the IE Blog and elsewhere about how the add-ons manager UI & add-on framework in general needed some updates. The IE team seems adamant not to change the framework itself, but said nothing about possible UI changes.
The reason I was concerned enough to write a post is because one of the commenters pointed out that while the add-on manager let the user disable bad add-ons, there was no easy way to remove them altogether.
We all know this is not strictly true, in that you could always go to the “Windows\Downloaded Program Files” folder to delete many of them. The problem of course, is that this method is not discoverable for most users, and that many BHOs like Flash, Silverlight etc. reside in their own folders, some in AppData others in Windows, and yet other controls in Program Files.
I was befuddled by how broken this process was and set about investigating my options. A few minutes of messing about with IE (as a Firefox user, IE is generally not given any attention, except for testing sites), I found the answer:
Click “more information” after selecting an add-on in the Manage Add-ons dialog.
Click the bottom-left “Remove” button to delete the add-on. You will get a UAC prompt with the default Windows 7 settings.
Note that this only works for add-ons not loaded in the browser, which restricts it from removing Flash, Silverlight, Java etc. So, there is still some room for improvement.
