A new security feature of IE7 is the “Phishing Filter”. This helps protect you by verifying every site you visit against a database of phishing websites. While this is great for helping you feel more secure online, it is terrible for performance. The reason being, each page request has to wait for a response from the phishing database before it will display to you.

By disabling this setting you can drastically increase the speed of IE7, however it, of course, comes with the price of security. If you are a savvy Internet surfer, having this feature really isn’t going to help much as you probably know how to recognize bogus sites, so you can disable via: Tools > Phishing Filter > Turn (on/off) Automatic Website Checking.

Even if you have this feature set to off, you can always check a site you are unsure of manually through the Tools > Phishing Filter menu.