Comment by SkyArrow
2 months ago
Yep, explorer.exe has always started up in the background. Pure speculation here, but this change likely involves preloading the UI surfaces and supporting bits such as disk free space, network share status, thumbnails etc.
Explorer.exe is not file explorer, it is the Windows UI system. It’s harder to see on modern Windows versions (since Windows will reload it automatically), but if you go into Win98 and kill the process, you’ll see your taskbar, desktop icons, right click menu, etc disappear.
File explorer is a part of that process, but consists of additional dynamic libraries and COM components that are loaded on-demand.
Old desktop replacements (like Litestep) specifically modified Windows to block explorer from loading the desktop to replace it (though, would still spawn it for file explorer).
Did you even read the blog post? It's almost a direct quote
> We’re exploring preloading File Explorer in the background to help improve File Explorer launch performance. This shouldn’t be visible to you, outside of File Explorer hopefully launching faster when you need to use it.