I have 5 msedge and 7 msedgewevview2 process running on my Windows 10. I would like to kill them and ban them. I never want to use MSEdge. There are three services, one of which is Automatic - Updater Service.
Is it safe to kill all such services and processes? The only reason I am asking is that sometimes MS bundles other activities/tasks in.
Edge is not natively uninstallable. It does no harm to remove the shortcut and not use it.
It likewise does no harm (certainly should not) to leave the services running. Leaving them will prevent damage we do not see right at this point .
I would just leave it. Even Chrome is now almost indistinguishable from Edge.
There are many other services (on my machine) (over 100) that I do not use, but they do not appear to cause any issue. So I do not turn then off. CPU runs <5% most of the time.
From your description, the issue might be that some third-party apps rely on Edge.
For example, starting a video conference session using the independent Zoom client application (as opposed to running Zoom in a browser) opens eight instances of MS Edge WebView2! As soon as Zoom is completely closed (not minimized to taskbar), those instances also close. Below is a view in Task Manager on the Details tab.
You can kill each instance of msedgewebview2.exe, but either Zoom will resurrect them, or the Zoom session itself will die. C'est la vie.
