14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is getting rid to retire Internet Explorer, with the old-school browser scheduled to go dark once and for all on June 15.
Internet Explorer, however, will continue to live on thanks to the direct integration in Microsoft Edge. As anyone should be able to figure out, the purpose of the IE mode bundled with Microsoft Edge is to prevent possible compatibility issues, as many companies out there still work with apps and services built with Internet Explorer in mind.
Microsoft has been working around the clock on refining the IE mode in Microsoft Edge, and this week, it announced a couple of improvements supposed to prepare the world for the demise of Internet Explorer.
New IE mode refinements
The first of them concerns IE COM objects.
“Many of you have built apps and workflows that call IE COM objects as essential pieces of their functionality. Running these scenarios using IE, or a combination of IE and Microsoft Edge with IE mode, worked as expected—but once IE stand-alone was disabled, some of those scenarios inadvertently broke,” Microsoft explains.
“Given the upcoming retirement of Internet Explorer, this fix jumped to the top of our list and has now been deployed widely. If you’re using the latest Windows 11 and Windows 10 updates, IE COM objects have been restored to their original functionality and will continue to work after the IE11 desktop application is disabled.”
Microsoft has also made the shared cookies between IE mode and Microsoft Edge to be bidirectional.
“Previously, cookies in IE mode passed session information from sites using the modern engine to sites using the legacy engine, but the same couldn’t be said for the reverse. Having cookies share information in either direction becomes particularly important as you modernize to a larger mix of modern and legacy sites,” Microsoft says.
Needless to say, make sure you run the latest version of Microsoft Edge to get these improvements.