I don’t know about you all, but in my Internet Explorer 8, I seem to get dead tabs a fair amount.  I will open up a new tab and type in a URL and it will tell me that it is connecting for; umm, well just about forever.  I have found that if I close that tab and open another it is still dead.  The only way around this is to open up another tab and hope that it would work.  If it didn’t I would have to just open another tab, keeping the old dead ones up.

I also noticed that it was hit and miss, and I could not figure out a pattern.

I was at a point where I was only using Chrome and Firefox on my PC because of this.  I wanted very badly to give IE8 a fair try, but I couldn’t get past this one VERY irritating issue.

Finally I got wise and “Google'd” (maybe I should have “Binged”) the issue and I found an article about it.  The answer is as follows.

It looks like the issue is related to the Loosely-Coupled feature in IE8.  In order to fix this, you will need to brave the registry.  Below are the instructions.

• Go to Start, type “regedit” in the search box, right click the regedit program, and choose Run as Administrator.
• You may be prompted to continue.
• In the registry editor click the arrow to expand a selection.
• Expand, HKEY_CURRENT_USER,
• then Software
• then Microsoft
• then Internet Explorer
• now select Main.
• Check for an option on the right list named “TabProcGrowth”,
• If it’s there double click on the item and set it to either “0” or “1”  (see below for details).
• If it’s not there, then you will need to create it
• Right click on the Main folder (in the left list) and selecting New, DWORD (32-bit) Value.
• “New Value #” should be created on the right.  You should be able to rename it now to “TabProcGrowth”
• Then double click on “TabProcGrowth” (the one you just created) and set to “0” or “1” as desired (see below).
• Restart Internet Explorer for this to take effect.

Below is a short explanation to what the choices 0 or 1 do.

Setting this to “0” will cause Internet Explorer to crash entirely if a tab crashes.
Setting this to “1” will allow Internet Explorer tabs to crash and recover without completely closing Internet Explorer.  (I recommend choosing 1)

There is also another good article on IE8 that has to do with this registry setting.

After I did that, my IE8 is actually working as I want it. 

I hope this helps those out there who really want to give IE8 a good fair try.