Microsoft Really Wants You To Stop Using Internet Explorer

Today, Microsoft is taking further steps to kill off Internet Explorer in Windows 10 by removing support for Microsoft Teams. 

In August, Microsoft began laying out its plans for the end of life for Internet Explorer and how they plan on slowly removing support for the archaic browser.

As part of this plan, Microsoft is no longer supporting Microsoft Teams in Internet Explorer starting on November 30th, 2020. While users may be able to use the service, there will be no guarantees that it will work correctly or Microsoft will no longer provide support.

“This means that after the above dates, 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,” Microsoft explained.

When logging into the Microsoft Teams web version, it will check if you’re visiting the site with incompatible Internet Explorer. If it is, the platform will display a message stating, “This website doesn’t work with Internet Explorer!” and recommend you to use the desktop client.

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While users can click on the ‘Keep using Internet Explorer,’ Microsoft makes no guarantee that Microsoft Teams will work correctly in the unsupported browser.

In addition to Teams, Microsoft quietly installed an ‘IEtoEdge’ Internet Explorer browser helper object (BHO) in October that automatically redirects incompatible sites to Microsoft edge. Microsoft has compiled a list of 1,200 sites that are incompatible with Internet Explorer and will be redirected to Microsoft Edge, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, ESPN, Yahoo Mail, and many more.

This feature is designed to check if a website is incompatible with Internet Explorer. When this is detected, an error message is displayed, and Internet Explorer automatically opens Microsoft Edge with the following message.

After the redirect, Microsoft Edge will display a banner recommending users set Edge as the default browser on Windows 10 for “modern experience, better compatibility and privacy.”

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Microsoft is also taking other steps to make Internet Explorer obsolete. For example, Microsoft will block Internet Explorer across Microsoft 365 services on August 17th, 2021.