Microsoft 365 apps say farewell to Internet Explorer 11 and Windows 10 sunsets Microsoft Edge Legacy

DM51673 

It would be good if Microsoft would explicitly list out in a single article what SPO features cease to work/exist when IE11 support for M365 services ends. Without that glimmers of false hope and plentiful confusion continues to exist. 

 

As I understand it Open with Explorer will be dead and any mapped drives/file locations to SPO too, as the needed persistent auth cookie used to help establish that connection to SPO by the WebDav component, is only refreshed by you periodically accessing SPO through IE.

 

That's why we're we're taking no chances, and ushering all our die hard Open with Explorer fans to use OneDrive to sync their document libraries.

You're likely correct about this and I'll have to start pushing users away from accessing their SPO files through File Explorer, but cynical hope springs eternal here on Microsoft's forums!

Since the cookie needs to be refreshed, if we're able to sign in to M365 through IE11 and then the M365 site redirects us to a page letting us know we have to use a different browser before using any of the apps, my theory is that doing this would be enough to save a fresh authorization cookie since (correct me if I'm wrong) all of the M365 apps including SPO use the same user token from https://login.microsoftonline.com for access permissions.

As long as we can refresh the cookie at https://login.microsoftonline.com and check off the "stay signed in" box, then even though we can no longer use SPO, Outlook, Word, etc., in the browser because those apps detect which browser we're using, we should still be able to access SPO in File Explorer with that same cookie, right?

Now I may be totally off base and WebDav requires something more than the cached authorization to https://login.microsoftonline.com. Let's say it does. Wouldn't the act of signing in to our SPO site be enough to refresh the necessary cookie before we get redirected/notified about requiring a different browser?

Obviously this is all just speculation until either someone can test it out for themselves or Microsoft decides to clear it up.

And we know how much Microsoft loves to clear things up.