Why does Outlook launch IE in the background?

Anonymous
2017-05-09T14:01:44+00:00

Hello,

We are using Office 365 ProPlus on Windows 10 Pro.  Opening Outlook (16.0.7927.1020) will launch two background processes of IE (iexplore.exe).  Why does Outlook open IE?  

This behavior does not happen in earlier versions of Office 365 ProPlus, such as 16.0.6001.1041.  It appears that an update for Office 365 ProPlus is causing Outlook to open IE in the background.

Thank you,

Evan

Outlook | Windows | Classic Outlook for Windows | For home

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  1. Anonymous
    2019-05-31T10:19:42+00:00

    It seems, MS uses this approach to render and compose HTML emails. I can imagine, it is a 'lazy approach' instead of having to maintain the legacy outlook render engine, they use the other legacy engine so less code has to be 'legacy'.

    MS direction is office365 online, not using locally. I do not expect office locally ever to be improved or rewritten from scratch. 

    If that is wished for, work locally and have no legacy apps in the background, go to libreoffice, I would advise.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-05-31T11:18:36+00:00

     have no legacy apps in the background, go to libreoffice, I would advise.

    Haha, good joke. Libreoffice is a big legacy junk, just dig into the source code and read about its history.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-06-03T14:02:32+00:00

    At my work we are experiencing a issue on our windows 7 machines the 2 Iexplorer.exe processes over time will cause performance degradation to the point a webex will take 5 minutes to open, Once we go in and end all Iexplorer.exe process including the outlook ones everything works normally and is back up to speed, 

    This only happens on windows 7 machines, our windows 10 boxes open outlook and its 2 iexplorer.exe process just fine with no issues over time. 

    We have had the case open with microsoft for 3 weeks at this point still no luck on the root cause or a fix other then we know its tied to the iexplorer.exe processes as our users have found out and now they just end them to get things working again which in turn makes it hard to get users to work with.... sigh 

    I would be ok with a opt in to a version of office / outlook that does not preheat IE since everything was fine up until that change the few second addin wait time is much better then browser and webex performance degrading to a crawl.

    over 2 years this has been being called out in way or another maybe preheating IE isnt the best way to make up for slow add-in performance....

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