We are running XP Home and IE 8.0. Does anyone know why, when I start IE, 3 seperate iexplore.exe processes start up. All 3 have
different amounts of memory being used. If I downsize IE to the taskbar, one of the processes responds by decreasing in it's memory
use, the other two seem not to be affected at all.
After having a little search (Google), it would appear that the programmers behind IE 8 decided to create a new process for each new tab used in IE. Do you happen to have 3 tabs opening when you start IE? If not, then no doubt the developers found a couple of other things that could be separated into new processes as well…
Although it may be considered odd, bad practice, bad design etc by some/many/Microsoft Haters, I can't see any real harm done by this. I will do some more digging and see if I can get a more conclusive answer.
Hope that info helps.
EDIT: Found this by someone from the IE dev team: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/1…ed-ie-lcie.aspx
It appears that the 'pros' in their eyes are based on the fact the each new tab (web-page) can have independent status, attributes and behavior. I assume that means that if a web-page causes a crash - only that tab will be closed and the rest will remain in-tact. This may be considered quite good by some. I haven't had a chance to read it thoroughly so I can't give my personal opinion I'm afraid, nor can I say anything about the few claims I have seen that this will cause IE to be a lot slower and more of a 'resource hog'.
Thank you jpshortstuff.
Yes indeed, when I open IE and multi-tabs, a new process is started with each tab.
This doesn't bother me near as much as the fact that after I have opened multi-tabs and then completely
shut down IE, two iexplore.exe processes are still running. I can shut IE down before I go to bed, and they
are still running in the morning. One of the processes was using 92 Mb of resources and the other was at 32 Mb
