Microsoft 365 apps will end support for Internet Explorer 11 by the end of 2021, Microsoft announced in a company blog post this week. It’s a big step from the company, which is looking to move customers to its more modern Edge browser even as some enterprises are stuck on legacy systems running Internet Explorer (IE).

The change will begin with Microsoft Teams Web application, which will end IE support on November 30 of this year. Microsoft 365 applications will follow by August 17, 2021. Here’s how Microsoft explained the 365 changes in its blog post:

Customers will have a degraded experience or will be unable to connect to Microsoft 365 apps and services on IE 11. For degraded experiences, new Microsoft 365 features will not be available or certain features may cease to work when accessing the app or service via IE 11.

That said, Redmond was careful to clarify that IE 11 is not going away. Many enterprises have proprietary Web applications that only work on that browser and are unlikely to drop it entirely in the immediate future.

Sometimes employees in those organizations use two browsers—IE for those apps and something else like Chrome for everything else. The blog post announcing these changes made the case that Edge’s “Internet Explorer mode” will allow Edge to work with some of those apps, though Microsoft obviously can’t guarantee that will always be the case with every app.

In addition to the IE 11 announcements, Microsoft also stated that the Microsoft Edge Legacy desktop app (pre-Chromium Edge) “will not receive new security updates” after March 9, 2021.

Internet Explorer 11 was introduced in 2013 as a core component of Windows operating systems. It continues to receive support in accordance with the end-of-life policies of the operating systems it shipped with—in Windows 10’s case, this means that support and security upgrades end in October 2025.

Listing image by Samuel Axon

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1699990