Yahoo! Axis reportedly slowing down IE9

Yahoo! Axis just launched yesterday for the iOS as well as browsers on the desktop, giving you a seamless way to continue reading webpages even while making a transition from your PC to your mobile device. While the iOS app seems to be functioning fine, the plug-in for IE9 seems to be slowing the browser down, compared to others. Microsoft’s IE9 has a built-in plugin manager that keeps a track of all the plugins running as well as the performance impact it has on the browser. Once it reaches a certain threshold, the manager will throw up a message stating that to improve browsing performance, disable these particular plugins. Yahoo!’s Axis plug-in now pops up in the warning message and according to Microsoft; it slows down IE9’s startup time by 0.07 seconds. 

Access Axis on your iPhone, and iPad

The message to disable add-ons has been with IE9 for a while now, but the manager or as Microsoft calls it, “Add-on Performance Advisor” has been triggered after the installation of the Axis plug-in. On iOS, this app acts like a browser, but it’s not really, as it uses Safari as its base and just acts as a skin over it. There’s no word on an app for Android, yet. On the desktop front, the plug-in sits at the bottom left corner of the browser with just a search bar, bookmark and a home button. Hitting the Home button will open a new tab and show you your custom page with all the sites you’ve recently bookmarked or the once you’ve chosen to read later.

This slight glitch in the plug-in for IE9 is not the only problem. Apparently, a security researcher reported just yesterday that the Axis add-on for Chrome contained a private key that could be used by potentially anyone to digitally sign browser extensions in Yahoo!’s name. Yahoo! has thankfully acknowledged this and has released an updated version of the plug-in for Chrome, since then. Axis is actually pretty cool and it’s quite easy to use and fast. If you haven’t tried it already, we recommend you give it a shot, especially if you own an iOS device.