Microsoft is Adding Classic ‘Edge Mode’ to New Edge Browser

[steven36]

Microsoft is developing a new 'Edge Mode' that lets users visit sites using the same rendering engine as Classic Edge to continue using legacy web applications.

 

 

In the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge, users can enable a feature called 'Internet Explorer Mode' that causes the browser to emulate Internet Explorer 11. This mode is designed for organizations that need to utilize web apps that were designed for the legacy browser.

 

 

When Internet Explorer mode is enabled, the Internet Explorer icon will appear in the address bar and sites that you visit will think you are running Internet Explorer 11.

 

Edge in Internet Explorer Mode

 

If Internet Explorer mode is enabled, the Microsoft Edge Dev and Canary builds have also added a new option called 'Open sites in Edge mode'. While nothing official has been announced about this feature, it will most likely allow the browser to emulate Classic Edge.

 

Open sites in Edge mode

 

To use this feature, an Edge flag named "Enable IE Integration" at edge://flags/#edge-internet-explorer-integration must be set to 'IE Mode'.

 

Enable IE Integration flag

 

Once configured, users can then launch the new Microsoft Edge program with the '--ie-mode-test' command line argument to enable the Internet Explorer mode feature.

 

Launch with --ie-mode-test argument

 

 

Once that feature is enabled, an additional 'Open sites in Edge mode' option will become available under Options -> More Tools.

 

This new mode does not appear to do anything as of yet.

Still being developed

This feature is still being developed as can be seen by the browser user-agents being sent when using these emulation modes.

 

When a browser visits a web site, a user-agent string is sent to the web site with each request that can be used to identify the name and version of the browser.

 

This user-agent can then be used by the site to determine what features the browser supports and any code changes that need to be made so that the web site renders properly.

Below are the various user-agent strings sent by Microsoft Edge, Classic Edge, and the IE and Edge modes.

 

New Microsoft Edge browser user-agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/81.0.4023.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/81.0.396.0

 

Classic Microsoft Edge user-agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36 Edge/18.19013

 

Internet Explorer Mode user-agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko

 

Edge Mode user-agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/81.0.4023.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/81.0.396.0

 

 

As you can see, when in Internet Explorer Mode the user agent is set to the one used by Internet Explorer 11.

 

Edge Mode, though, still uses the same user-agent as the new Microsoft Edge rather than Classic Edge, which indicates that this feature is still in its infancy and being developed.

 

As with all Microsoft software features, this one may not make it to Release, but based on the availability of IE Mode, we can expect that it will.

 

 

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