Microsoft: Internet Explorer is retiring soon. Here’s why you should drop it sooner

Microsoft is urging businesses using Internet Explorer 11 for legacy apps and websites to get ahead of the game and cull the app before it is retired on June 15, 2022. 

Microsoft’s advice comes six weeks ahead of it officially retiring IE 11, which it announced in May 2021. 

“We know that waiting for something to happen can be stressful, especially with complex IT environments. So instead of waiting, we recommend that you schedule your own internal retirement date – the best way to prepare for IE disablement after June 15, is to proactively retire IE in your organizations before June 15,” Microsoft’s Eric Can Aelstyn said in a blogpost.  

SEE: Microsoft upgraded 190,000 PCs to Windows 11 (but even they couldn’t upgrade everything)

The advice is for organizations to line up all their ducks for IE’s retirement, such as identifying sites that rely on the legacy browser and testing that IE mode within the Chromium Edge browser works as expected. 

IE mode in Microsoft Edge is supported through at least 2029 to give web developers eight years to modernize legacy apps and eventually remove the need for IE mode. 

After customers have tested IE mode on a smaller scale, Microsoft recommends setting a date to deploy the Disable IE policy – effectively the internal IE retirement date. 

“We recommend that this be a few weeks prior to June 15 to provide time to resolve any issues,” notes Aelstyn.

Microsoft also recommends users import their data from IE to Edge before the internal IE retirement date. Users can copy and paste edge://settings/importData into Edge’s address bar, then choose “Microsoft Internet Explorer” from the selections under “Import from”. 

Ahead of the latest advice from Microsoft, the company made changes to Windows 11 and Windows 10 to restore certain functionality that caused IE mode in Edge to fail on legacy sites once IE 11 was disabled. These changes should give admins more confidence to deploy the disable IE policy, assuming their PCs are running the latest versions of Windows.