This browser is no longer supported.
Upgrade to Microsoft Edge to take advantage of the latest features, security updates, and technical support.
![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(128, 8%, 22%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EA%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
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
Using Classic Outlook on Windows for personal email, calendar, and contact management
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
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.
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.
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.