ie Why does IE10 leave so many processes open?

[Lord Method Man]

Currently have IE10 (Windows 7 64-bit) running with one tab open, and I have 8 iexplore.exe processes running in Task Manager. It always does this. My work laptop runs IE9 and only ever has 1 + however many tabs are open processes running, but my machines at home always have a ton. Whats up with this?

 

[vcfan]

disable all addons and see if it still happens.

[Lord Method Man]

Disabled all addons and extensions (only had Flash and the Microsoft ones installed) as well as all my TPLs and I still had 6 processes running with IE closed.

[+LogicalApex MVC]

The concept is process isolation. If you spin up child processes for as much of the browser as you can you can, in theory, increase security and stability. A crash in a tab, plugin, or non-essential component will be isolated and unable to pull the entire browser down with it. In regards to security you're able to offer better isolation against attempts to exploit security holes in the browser as you lock code in a way the OS can aid in blocking.

[Lord Method Man]

So basically its normal behavior? I was under the impression there should just be one 'main' IE process and one additional process for each tab.

[+LogicalApex MVC]

So basically its normal behavior? I was under the impression there should just be one 'main' IE process and one additional process for each tab.

I haven't looked into the way IE does process isolation in IE 10 as I no longer use IE on a daily basis, but what I mentioned is the basic idea.

 

Additionally, spinning up multiple processes can also lead to a decent boost to performance as the OS can push the processing of various tabs across multiple processor cores.