With the sunset of Internet Explorer having been a few months past, many in the enterprise environment are realizing how many legacy apps are still dependent on the dated browser. Whether it’s a rarely used finance portal or engineering tool, the need for IE is still there to fill the gap until these legacy systems are upgraded to a more modern standard.
To facilitate this, Microsoft added a feature called IE mode last year to allow organizations to move to the newer Edge browser, without breaking these applications. The surprising part of this is how effective it is. Going from personal experience, some apps that had longer load times and slow speeds running queries, ran faster in the new IE mode. All without any backend upgrades or tweaks, other than implementing the GPOs and site lists to enable the feature across all endpoints.
I’ll briefly go through the configuration of enabling the feature in an Active Directory environment with no real interruption to the end user. While also preparing for the possibility of Microsoft removing the legacy completely from supported versions of its windows OS’.
In terms of enabling this feature, the legwork required of IT is about as minimal as it gets. With IE still being in the OS’ that have it, if there are any configuration issues the users can still use the legacy browser at the time of writing this. This gives ample time for ample time for testing internally and with your pre-selected test groups.
By default, the feature isn’t enabled and will need to be turned on. Users can do this unless specified by your organizations GPO that it can’t. However, the most effective way is to enable it organization wide with a site list. This sets it so that the mode is only enabled for the applications that require it. To do this simply open on your terminal server or DC the GPO management console. Per Microsoft’s article, enable the following options:
Use the Enterprise Mode IE website list (Internet Explorer)
Configure the Enterprise Mode Site List (Microsoft Edge, version 78 or later)
This policy lets you create a separate Enterprise Mode Site list for Microsoft Edge. Enabling this policy overrides the settings in the “Use the Enterprise Mode IE website list” policy, if “Configure Internet Explorer integration” is enabled. Disabling or not configuring this policy doesn’t affect the default behavior of the “Configure Internet Explorer integration” policy.
The site list will be a simple XML file that is hosted through IIS on a web server that all desktops in your domain have access to, such as an intranet web server. The file can be updated and on the next polling will reflect on the endpoints with the GPO set to point to it.
Seeing as IE is still currently available on Windows 10, it makes it relatively easy to test in larger groups of users since if the settings or mode doesn’t work properly, they can just go back into IE to run the needed application. However, with IE being an end-of-life browser it’s best to be ahead of the curve and work out any bugs or issues that may arise. IE Mode is well worth a look in organizations that have systems that still use software that is dependent on ActiveX.