Internet Explorer, developed by the Microsoft is one of the most popular web browsers being used by internet users. If you are using Internet Explorer as your default browser, perhaps the most troublesome and irritation problem you face is that the Internet Explorer keeps crashing all the time. Quite often, while you are in the middle of browsing something, you might get the message – ‘Internet Explorer has stopped working’ and would not let you do anything else other than to close the browse. IE9 and IE10 were released with some major improvements to avoid this issue, but most of the times the problem remains.
Reasons why Internet Explorer keeps crashing
There can be several reasons as to why this happens, but the most common reason is due to the add-ons which are installed on Internet Explorer.
How do you know if and what add-ons are installed on your Internet Explorer? There’s an add-on manager on Internet Explorer which allows you to check the add-ons installed on it.
To access and modify the add-ons Click on the tools menu on Internet Explorer 7 or 8.
Tools -> Manage Add-ons -> Enable or disable add-ons
If you are using version 6 or earlier, you can find the add-ons manager on:
Tools -> Internet Options -> Programs -> Manage add-ons
On IE 9 and above, you would find add-ons manager as shown in the following screenshots:
From this window, you can see all the add-ons currently installed on Internet Explorer. Most probably, one of those add-ons are not installed properly, which is why Internet Explorer keeps crashing time to time.
Fixing the Internet Explorer crashes
To rectify the issue, you can use the add-ons manager to remove or repair existing add-ons. Select a suspected add-on and click on the ‘Disable’ button (as shown in figure 3) to disable it.
After that, check to see if Internet Explorer starts working again. If it doesn’t, you will have to try disabling/enabling add-ons one by one to see which one caused the problem.
If the problem still exists even after disabling add-ons, you can use the Microsoft Self Help Page to resolve the issue. When you run the troubleshooter, you will be presented with a series of questions, which, when answered the tool will start to rectify the issue. However, this works only for the IE versions 8 and below.