Why does Outlook launch IE in the background?

@Microsoft

Any chance we can get this fixed anytime soon as it has been ongoing since May 2017 and still iexplorer.exe is loading on opening Outlook.

I am running on O365 2016 release: 1811 (Build 11029.20079 Click-to-Run)

Outlook for O365 MSO Version:  16.0.11029.20045 32bit

On RDS we push everyone over to Chrome but iexplore.exe is still loading as everyone uses Outlook which is wasting system resources.

Hello,

I have been experiencing this same issue on a users machine (Windows 10 1809, Office 2016 pro plus x64) seeing that two IE windows were launched in the background of Outlook causing it to crash on startup. I did notice however that after Outlook had run for some time the two IE windows would close and the stability of the machine would return to normal. 

After going through multiple troubleshooting setups, upgrading the user to O365 ProPlus and trying various suggestions found in the post. I found that the user was running Microsoft Dynamics 365 plugin (version 8.20002.0137) I disabled the plugin as a last-ditch effort to resolve the issue and found that the IE windows no longer appear and Outlook runs without crashing.

I can only imagine that these windows appear so that the plugin can connect to our CRM database to pull down any updates or changes that have been made since the user last connected. I am not sure if this will resolve the problem for other people in this forum but it might help some.

Sadly in our case, this now means our user is unable to use this version of the Dynamics plugin but I will be testing other versions soon to see if we have the same result.

Please note that in our case we are running a hybrid 365/On-prem environment with the majority being hosted in 365.

Regards

Sam Perry

I have been noticing erratic behavior with Outlook 365 for some time and when trying to end tasks have noticed Internet Explorer running (which I never use). After some testing it seems to be the exact same issue that so many people have been reporting here for almost TWO years.

While searching, I found this recent article from Microsoft: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-IT-Pro-Blog/The-perils-of-using-Internet-Explorer-as-your-default-browser/ba-p/331732

WHY is Outlook launching IE if it's so perilous to use?!

I have the latest Windows 10 Pro and the latest Office 365 and am an admin.

Another in a long, long,  line of examples of Microsoft  incompetence/dishonesty/deception/general lack of respect.   Pick one or all.  We are currently looking at moving to Apple or Linux.  Tired of wasting time and money with MS.

So this issue is happening with our end users as well however I do not believe it is isolated to just Outlook.  I tested on my own Win 10 64 bit machine and with each launch of an Office 365 App such as word, excel, etc. each app would open 2 instances of internet explorer.  When the app is closed the Internet explorer background process remains orphaned.  We are version 1902 build (11328.20158 Click-to-run). 

This appears to be a bug but would love to know from Microsoft if there are any intended updates since this has been an ongoing issue for well over a year. 

Also please note that these machines that this issue occurs on could be older with Win 8.1 or a newly imaged machine so this sounds like the O365 platform as a whole.  I would not be so concerned with IE launching as a process as a result of the add-ons but need to have these processes finalize as the app closes in order to not be holding resources on the computer.