You may be aware that Internet Explorer as a standalone application is going away later this year (15th June 2022), which means Microsoft will no-longer support it on business desktops and no-longer offer updates and security patches. This should be fine as IE11 is very old and isn’t used by most people, however, certain sites (particularly in large enterprises) will only work in Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s solution is to enable Internet Explorer inside Edge, their modern browser.
‘Internet Explorer Mode‘ as it’s known, allows you to supply a list of website URLs which Edge will open using Internet Explorer. This is shown in Edge by a tiny IE icon to the left of the address bar:-
Setting-up IE Mode using Microsoft 365 and Intune
It used to be a faff to get this working but things have gotten easier since Microsoft allowed to you to create your site lists in 365 Admin rather than in proprietary files.
- Go to the Microsoft 365 Admin console, find Settings, Org Settings. Choose ‘Microsoft Edge site lists’ from the options. It should take you here.
- You start by creating a new list of sites to open in IE Mode. Click ‘Create a new list’, give it a name and a description – you can create many lists and assign them to different groups/users. Edit the list that was created…
3. Start adding site URLs using ‘Add a site’…
The ‘Opens in’ menu allows you to choose how the site is handled by Edge. Usually, ‘Internet Explorer Mode’ is fine, as this will open the site using IE as a tab inside Edge along with your other tabs.
Just keep adding sites until your lists is finished. Naturally, this can include local web apps on your internal network too.
4. Go back to the list of site lists, select the newly-created list and click, ‘Publish site list’, give it a version number (star with 1 and increment whenever you update the list.)
Configuring a Policy in Intune
You next need to configure Edge on your client PC to use the IE mode list you have create.
In the 365 Admin portal, you’ll see the ID for the list you’ve made…
Keep that to hand as you’ll need it for the Intune policy.
- In the Intune portal, go to Devices then Configuration Profiles. Create a new profile, choose ‘Windows 10 or Later’ as the Platform and ‘Templates’ as the Profile type, then ‘Administrative Templates’ to create the policy.
- Give is a sensible name and a helpful description and click Next.
- You need to add a couple of user settings.
- Search for Configure Internet Explorer integration, set it to Enabled and choose Internet Explorer mode and add the setting.
- Search for Configure the Enterprise Mode Cloud Site List, set it to Enabled and paste in the IE mode site list ID from the 365 admin portal.
- Define any scope tags, assign it to the users/groups required and create the policy.
If you don’t force a sync in Intune for each user/device, you will have to wait for the policy to deploy. Once it’s rolled-out, sites in your list will open within Edge but using Internet Explorer. Here’s the IBM site in IE mode in Edge…
Don’t be fooled, this is Internet Explorer running that tab within Edge; it’s not an emulator, it’s really IE.
I’ve used this a few times to help clients continue to use their legacy web apps and do it in one browser, Microsoft Edge. Internet Explorer will disappear from business desktops soon and this is the only way to keep using IE so don’t delay, give it a try.