Internet Explorer uses a lot of CPU?

[DeltaXray]

Hi,
Surface Pro 3 finally launched in the UK on Friday and I was lucky enough to get my hands on an i5/8GB/256 model.

I love the build quality of this thing, it feels really premium.

One thing I am not happy about is how hot this thing gets just when browsing the web with IE (modern version).

Without fail after about 5-10mins usage the thing gets hot enough for the fans to kick in. Surely that can't be right?

I've discovered that when I run IE it consistently uses 45-50% CPU, to find that I had to snap task manager as if I just switch to desktop it dies down.

Does the same thing happen to everyone else? Bearing in mind right now I have one tab open which is on the new thread page here, there shouldn't be anything using that much CPU?

I have all available windows updates.

Any help appreciated here

 

[hughlle]

I rarely find MUI IE to use much of any power, but an insane amount of ram (500mb for a big search tab). But even with the app using little cpu the fan still ends up running like crazy.

CPU usage seems to be slightly different to what i'm used to seeing though. For instance it'll be sat at 0% and then simply scrolling down the task manager will bump it to 50%, just for the task manager. On my desktop (old, nothing fancy) the same thing will only raise it to say 4%.

 

[ctitanic]

Usually the amount of CPU used by IE is relative to scripts being run by the pages that you are accessing, the amount of flash objects inserted in those pages and the amount of objects downloaded to IE temp folder.

 

[ctitanic]

my advice, enable Tracking Protection in IE.

 

[GreyFox7]

I rarely find MUI IE to use much of any power, but an insane amount of ram (500mb for a big search tab). But even with the app using little cpu the fan still ends up running like crazy.

CPU usage seems to be slightly different to what i'm used to seeing though. For instance it'll be sat at 0% and then simply scrolling down the task manager will bump it to 50%, just for the task manager. On my desktop (old, nothing fancy) the same thing will only raise it to say 4%.

This may have to do with the much higher screen resolution. scrolling in particular means constantly updating the screen shifting up or down with 4x pixels.

In a related but different scenario I tell all my Virtual Desktop users on the other side of the planet from the host; scrolling is the absolute worst thing you can do because its trying to send all those screen updates across the high latency Wide Area Network/Internet. if I had my way they would replace all their mice with ones that don't have the scroll wheel. Page Up/Down way better.

 

[DeltaXray]

It is strange. I've just opened up Modern IE and left it at the New Tab page, so there are no web pages open at all, and CPU spiked up just for the IE process and was flitting between 40-55%.

I can have the desktop IE open no problems and just browsing this site for example the CPU stays in low single digits. It seems that just by virtue of having Modern IE open something is going wrong and spiking the CPU up. This is pretty much a stock install, I've not installed anything else on here yet.

 

[GreyFox7]

There may have been some random issues introduced with the August updates.

 

[DeltaXray]

Appears to be flash. If I disable Flash in the extension settings, then the CPU doesn't spike. It is strange as it is only Modern IE that it occurs with, I can browse with Flash enabled in classic IE no problem. Also that it happens at the new tab screen, perhaps it is loading it and it is hanging or something.

Is there something I can install to block flash (Like Safaris click-to-flash, would be perfect). If I disable flash in the extensions options then it still just keeps prompting every time it wants to load.

 

[DeltaXray]

An update to this issue: I did a 'refresh my PC' and it appears to have fixed that bug. I don't know why I should need to do that on an essentially stock install, but it appears to have.

Interestingly, once I did the refresh, and ran windows update, it found all 40odd updates but also found the same firmware updates were required. I would have thought that the refresh would have kept the updated firmware levels (being independent of the OS) but it found them and installed them...