IE9/IE10 users in SPO - Time to move to modern browsers!

Microsoft

 

Summary

If you are one of the few organizations still accessing SharePoint Online using earlier versions of Internet Explorer, make it a new year's resolution to move to IE11 or Edge! Some new functionality coming to SharePoint Online in 2017 will require the latest version of IE, and users who are using older versions may be redirected to a page that tells them to upgrade their browsers.

 

Details

As most of you probably already know, Microsoft had announced the end of support for versions of Internet Explorer earlier than IE11 as of January of 2016. In SharePoint Online, our engineers have been taking care to not fundamentally break any critical functionality, and even avoided using some of the newer technologies in our pages to support these earlier browsers.

 

One year down the line from end of support, with the usage of earlier versions of Internet Explorer now under a few percent of our users, we are finally starting to leverage some of these more advanced browser capabilities that earlier browsers do not support. 

 

This means if you are still using earlier versions of Internet Explorer you will start to see more "diminished experiences", and sometimes functionality will be completely broken. Other times, if a new experience requiring modern browser features detects that an earlier browser is being used, users will be redirected to a page that asks them to use a modern browser. There is no set time for this change, it will gradually happen over time as features are updated to use advanced browser capabilities.

 

We had signaled the end of support in our earlier blog posts, especially for modern experiences we are building. We will reach out to specific customers where we see large percentage of IE9 and IE10 usage to ask these customers to move to IE11 or Edge. We are also in the process of updating our user facing documentation to indicate that IE11, Edge or another modern browser is required to access SharePoint Online.

12 Replies

What will you do with Infopath as it sometimes still needs IE10 settings..

Does this mean that we will no longer be able to import Excel spreadsheets as Lists?

 

I am unable to do it in Edge (or Firefox for that matter), as it requires ActiveX controls.  I am only able to do it in IE.

 

 

Hi @Deleted, @Luke Brandt you can still use Internet Explorer 11, which remains supported. With IE11's Enterprise Mode, you should be able to run web applications designed for older versions of IE, and you get to receive security updates for any new issues that may be discovered.

 

More information on the Enterprise Mode of IE11 can be found towards the end of this article.

Hi @Luke Brandt, you can still use IE11 for this functionality, which remains supported. We will eventually update these functionalities so that they can run in other browsers that don't support ActiveX as well, but we don't have a timeline for that yet.

Hi,

 

What is required to insure my SharePoint Online site collections are prepped to operate in IE 11? Would this be something that i have to change on the master page of my site collections. Currently in SPO, the Master page is set to IE=10 support. 

 

Any insight would be greatly appreciated,


Dave

Are we able to determine who is accessing the site using outdated browsers?  Or do we just wait for people to call about the "downgraded" experience?

 

Also, would compatibility mode trigger this warning/alert?  Lots of people use Compatibility Mode as a shotgun solution so it is turned on all over the place.  Display intranet sites in Compatibility Mode is an option which might affect our Sharepoint sites.

Hi @Dave Medeiros, IE11 should handle these browser hints just fine. Some of our pages make use of them, but they are compatible with IE11. You should see no negative effects of running SharePoint pages in IE11.

Hi @Paul Tower, There is a way to take a create a browser report using the PowerShell command Get-O365ClientBrowserDetailReport for Exchange Online. It is not the report for SharePoint Online, but it may reveal the users in your organization that are using older versions of Internet Explorer.

 

Our hope is that you are able to push IE11 deployment broadly to machines across your organization using some of the deployment tools available here.

 

Our reporting accounts for telling the compatibility mode apart from underlying browser version. The user agent strings generated by IE11 in IE9 compatibility mode are different than IE9 itself, so we use that information in our analysis.

Thank you Kerem for your response, 

 

We currently have IE 11 to run anything with sharepoint.com in the URL to run in compatability mode. Should this have any impact on our user base even though we are currently running in IE 11? 

Hi @Dave Medeiros. As long as you are running IE11, everything should be fine. Some of our classic pages may instruct IE to use IE10 compatibility mode, which is expected. Our modern pages will make use of some of the new browser capabilities and IE11 supports those. So both modern and classic pages will work well using IE11.

So your statement and others that I've seen all mention Edge as an alternative to IE11.

Why would some of our users using Edge instead of IE11 get the following message when browsing SharePoint online sites: ?

You've stumbled upon some vintage web tech
This website runs on older technology and will only work in Internet Explorer

Hi @Deleted, Edge and IE11 are both supported. Earlier versions of IE (10, 9, 8, ...) are no longer supported. So Edge and IE11, as well as latest versions of other browsers are the alternatives to earlier versions of IE. 

 

Could you tell me what pages show that message when you use Edge? They shouldn't, and I can file a bug to get that fixed.