I’m in an IE hating kind of mood this week. For no reason, IE11 decided to die on my new laptop on Thursday. That’s forced me back into the hands of Google (I find Firefox to be the worst to use of the 3 big browsers).
What’s happening? When I open IE11 it comes up with “Your last browsing session closed unexpectedly”. And then it locks up. I’ve reset IE and I’ve deleted all items. I’ve disabled all plugins and no joy.
One thing I found was interesting: I reset the home page to the default. IE opens just fine then. But try to browse to a page and it freezes before the page can load. It’s as if the rendering of the page is causing the issue.
A nice suggestion I got via twitter from Tero Alhonen was to:
- Disable Browser sync via PC Settings > SkyDrive > Sync Settings
- Uninstall IE from Programs & Features > Windows Features
- Reboot
- Reinstall IE
- Reboot
- Re-test
Why try this? Because a new test user on the same machine has no issues.
No joy.
I have also tried removing and recreating my user. That, in my opinion, is going too far to fix this issue, and although I could go to some extremes down this path, I am not willing to do so. Why the frak should I? A browser should just damned well work.
BTW, I have found plenty of people on forums having the same issue for months. A few seem to have resolved their issue by installing a new NVIDIA graphics driver. My Yoga’s devices are up to date and it has a Intel HD graphics.
So IE11 is now dead (literally) to me. And MSFT wonders why Win8x isn’t doing well ….
EDIT:
A quick update. Most sites will not load, e.g. Bing or Google. Some (a very few) load slowly, e.g. independent.ie. This leads me to think that there is a rendering issue in IE11 that is specific to my user profile, and was synced in via Skydrive.
EDIT 2:
Tero came back to me with another idea. Disable GPU rendering in the advanced IE settings. I opened up Internet Options in Control Panel and checked Use Software Rendering Instead Of GPU Rendering. I started up IE and pages are opening as expected. Thanks Tero!
Wondering the version of your Intel HD Graphics driver on the Yoga – is it the latest? As in offered by Intel?
I only install drivers from the machine manufacturer.
This is definitely video driver related with the rendering engine. I’m seeing this widely myself, and with many customer machines, and messsing with video drivers and or software rendering almost always resolves.
The other thing to note as that the Application Crash events in the Event Log are typically referencing mshtml.dll as the culprit.
This issue has gotten REALLY bad with IE 11 and Windows 8.1
I’ve been an IE fan to the end, and this has really pushed me over the edge. That Chrome market share is going to keep growing.
Let’s hope Microsoft can get themselves back on track with Windows in 2014
Interesting issue, i had a crashing problem with IE for a while there, it ended up being AdBlock plus extension blowing up the browser. Did Intel have a new driver for your HD4000 on the website maybe?