This is a companion article to previous ones on the same subject:
Enabling Enterprise Mode for Internet Explorer 11 and Edge
Enterprise Mode changes in Edge browser
Cloud managed Edge IE Mode site list
Simulating Internet Explorer retirement scenario
All these articles talk about enabling IE mode or doing additional things to aleviate issues when IE is eventually retired this year. Below are just a few quick tips.
- Before adding new URL to site list for IE Mode always test first (or ask users) to see how it works with regular Edge mode. I had cases when users were asking to add a site that they were always using with IE only to find out that it is actually already working fine in Edge.
- Alternatively ask users to try it out first with manual IE Mode. You will find it in Edge’s Settings > Default browser. First you need to switch mode to Allow and then add pages. This is a good way to first check whether adding URL to global site list would actually help.
- Fourth article above is about simulating IE retirement. That GPO can help you test scenario when IE is gone. You can apply it to a few machines in your fleet and ask users to use their regular shortcuts and sites and see where things break.
- One of the ways to deploy global site list to machines is by using GPO’s Preferences > Windows Settings > Files with a Replace action (it has to be Replace, otherwise it will not overwrite the file and it will just copy the file on a first run). You can store the file say in C:\Windows and copy it from a network share. Once you edit the xml file on the share in a few hours it will sync to all machines with policy update.
- As described in third article, if you use Intune, you don’t need GPO and to store file somewhere. Don’t even need to work with xml. Everything can be done in a new web console in Microsoft 365 portal.
- If you are using GPO and network share option, use some editor to modify the site list xml directly. I have noticed that when i tried to use the Enterprise Mode Site List app it would always load previous version of a list cached in this app and not the actual latest version of xml. You can lose changes made by others this way. There is a workaround to this by also saving the config emie2 file and importing it into the app every time, but that’s just too many steps for me. Editing xml is pretty straightforward.
- Don’t forget to up the version at the top of xml by 1 every time you modify the site list. Otherwise Edge will ignore the modified file.
- Edge checks for site list xml immediately on startup, if it doesn’t have an already cached version. But it waits for 60 seconds to check if cached version exists. And then it periodically checks every 4 hours. So, when testing either wait 1 min or go to edge://compat and force update.