It’s perfectly normal to see two or more iexplore.exe processes in the Task Manager when an Internet Explorer 8 window is open. This is due to a change implemented in Internet Explorer 8 where the frame and tabs are split, each having their own processes. Each tab has its own* process so that the rest of the tabs and the browser frame/window are not affected when a single tab process crashes.
Note: If you have 60 tabs open you won’t see 60 iexplore.exe processes. There may 20 iexplore.exe processes, with each process hosting a number of tabs. As per the IE Team Blog, this a balancing act between performance and reliablility. Quoting from Internet Explorer Team Blog:
The more capable your system is, the more processes we create, up to a point. It’s based on a curve. If you use 60 tabs at a time, we don’t want to create 60 tab processes, as the perf impact would be too severe. It’s a balancing act between performance and relability. For example, if you had 60 tabs open and we created 20 processes, we would co-locate 3 tabs in each process (60 tabs / 20 processes). If a single tab process failed, we would only have to recover 2 other tabs. The benefit of "perfect" isolation would not be worth the cost of 40 extra processes in most cases. It’s a case of diminishing returns.
Apart from this, there are other architectural changes made in Internet Explorer 8, which is collectively known as Loosely-Coupled IE (LCIE). For detailed information on these changes, see the following posts at the IE Team Blog.
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Thanks Caz!
A friend was describing the same issue to me and I found your suggestion and turns out he had the D addon. The key difference with the presence of this addon is the memory usage viewable via task manager. The new propagations of ie all had much much greater memory usage than the typical page.
Ross, same problems with IE 8 as you. Although I do not use IE 8 but others in my family do, I had to figure out a fix. Using “Hijack This” in admin mode, I deleted an IE 8 add-on named “D”. Turns out this add-on had an unverified signature and little to no details. This cleared up our issue.
same problem here , sometimes about 20 ie8 processes running even after ie8 is closed , when closed with end task I get a small balloon note saying tab has been recovered, but no tabs have been opened.
I am running Win7 x64 , so far this is the only pain of a program. The only fix I have found is not to use it.
meh. if one website has a problem and causes a crash, the entirety of IE8 still crashes. it doesn’t just close the 1 tab or the 3 tabs that are associated with the one crashed tab within the tab process. all of IE8 still crashes.
it’s not like it’s just going to close those tabs and you can keep working. their solution works in theory, but in practice, they implemented it incorrectly.
[...] tabs and the browser frame/window are not affected when a single tab process crashes. Read more here. The Windows Club | [...]
sollution: Get Opera Web Browser, install it, make it default and just forget IE 7 or 8…This is the best and easiest way….Common guys, Opera is a lot much better….
Up until 2009-July-10 I had only one stance of “IEXPLORE.EXE” (MD5:B60DDDD2D63CE41CB8C487FCFBB6419E) running. But now I see one parent, and then under it child processes are created one for each IE TAB. What is wierd is that if I SUSPEND just one of >=1 child processes, then the parent process becomes NOT RESPONDING. (I suspend the process using ProcExplorer). I seached to find if any one is started during boot, winlogon or IE startup in the registry under [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer\ShellExecuteHooks] I find nothing.
Can someone shed their views what is going on with new IE8.0.6001.18783? I run ZoneAmrm/Kaspersky system on Windows 6/SP2
How can i switch it off again because it is using up too much memory. If i can’t switch it off I will go back to ie7 – much more stable !!
this is fine but why when you close internet explorer does the 8 or so processes are still running in the background