There are circumstances that require more than one. Just one for instance it the bug IE has that make drop down lists the top most item on the page. The answer to your question is no cute is not in an iframe. There is one cute editor instance directly on the page itself. To replicate, simply place cute editor on a form and add iframes to the page. It seems to me that cute could be attempting to parse every iframe on the page. If not, why is the number of iframes directly proportional to the speed of cute editor?