Microsoft Teams Will End Support for IE 11 in November

Earlier this year, Microsoft started including its new browser, Edge, with the latest release of Windows 10. Microsoft is aggressively pushing the adoption of the chrome-based browser and is looking to move its customers away from Internet Explorer.

Announced today, Microsoft is saying that by this time next year, Microsoft 365 apps and services will no longer support IE 11. This doesn’t mean that the company’s online services will stop working with the older browser on August 18^th, but you should treat it this way.

Microsoft is providing the following guidance:

• Beginning November 30, 2020, the Microsoft Teams web app will no longer support IE 11.
• Beginning August 17, 2021, the remaining Microsoft 365 apps and services will no longer support IE 11.

The other notable deadline is that on March 9^th, Microsoft’s old-Edge will no longer be supported. That version of Edge initially shipped with Windows 10 but Microsoft has abandoned it in favor of the “new” Edge that is based on Chromium – if you are using legacy Edge, you will need to migrate soon as well.

While this may not seem like a huge deal, to large enterprise operations that have standardized on IE 11, it has been around since about 2013, this is going to be a significant announcement. But with the availability of stand-alone apps, there should be work-arounds if customers are not able to migrate away from IE 11 for their M365 services before the deadline.

Microsoft is standardizing all of its online services around Chromium as that’s what its new browser utilities and it also makes it compatible with many other popular browsers, such as Chrome.