(Updated) Reminder of Upcoming IE11 Retirement in Microsoft 365 Apps

Updated December 10, 2020: Microsoft will not be moving forward with rolling out the notification banner at this time.On August 17, 2020, Microsoft officially announced, via MC220490, the timeline for retiring support for Internet Explorer 11 in Microsoft 365 apps. Microsoft would also like to take this opportunity to remind you of the upcoming Microsoft Edge Legacy desktop application retirement, which was announced in parallel with the IE 11 change.

To help customers currently using IE11 prepare for this, we are showing a banner at the top of Microsoft 365 services which contains a link to the download page for new Microsoft Edge.

In Office for the Web, this banner will be a yellow browser bar in the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for the Web Apps.

• The banner will only be shown to customers accessing the web apps through the IE11 browser
• The banner is not modal – users will not have to interact with it before using the app in other ways, but they can dismiss it if they choose
• The banner is shown to each user once a week. So if a user sees this in Word for the Web, they won’t see it again when they boot Excel for the Web that same week.

When this will happen:

This banner has already been shown in some Microsoft 365 services since August. Office for the Web Consumer users started seeing the browser bar in early September.

We plan to start showing this banner to Commercial customers in early December.

How this will affect your organization:

The browser bar itself should have no impact on your organization or the normal workflows of your employees.

What you need to do to prepare:

If your organization is still using Internet Explorer 11, you should already have plans to move to another browser. If you have not made such plans, this detailed article has all the information you need to plan for an organization-wide deployment of the new Edge, while also answering some FAQs.