Microsoft: Rumors of Internet Explorer's demise have been greatly exaggerated

Kareem Anderson

Extended Enterprise Site Discovery support for IE8, IE9, and IE10 proves IE will be around for a while

Reports on the death of Internet Explorer caught like wildfire last week. Without out any substantial information, some news outlets spun an execution story of IE similar to the, “look at the flowers” meme based on a scene from this season’s Walking Dead tv show. Today, the IE team is carving out time to reassure people (specifically enterprise), that they hadn’t quite unholstered their side piece yet when it comes to the support for Internet Explorer.

Perhaps the tarnished brand of Internet Explorer will become increasingly deprecated over the next few years. Microsoft may even look to reduce it’s appearance in marketing material or in the promotion of Windows going forward, but the browser (more importantly, the functionality) itself will still look to service enterprise who move at glacier speed to new technologies.

In today’s blog post, the IE team is announcing two new updates that can now be found in the Enterprise Site Discovery options found in IE8, IE9, and IE10. This update includes expansion of Enterprise Site Discovery for older browsers as well as the ability to scope enterprise sites by zones and domains. 

Enterprise Site Discovery on IE8, IE9, IE10, and IE11

Originally shipped in November of 2014 for IE11, the same Enterprise Site Discovery support and enhanced privacy options are now bundled in an update this month to support previous versions of IE. The updates allow IT Pros discovery items like, which of their Enterprise line of business applications are being used- and how. The expansion for older browsers is especially useful for enterprise who deal in dreaded ActiveX documents. IT pros who deal with ActiveX can now prioritize their testing of apps leveraging that technology specifically.

Extended Enterprise Site Discovery support for IE8, IE9, and IE10 proves IE will be around for a while

Scoping Enterprise Site Discovery

Beyond simply expanding discovery to previous versions of IE, the second part of this month’s update gives IT pros the tools to specify which zones and domains are included in the information gathered from Enterprise Site Discovery. This discovery tool set now helps paint a clearer picture for IT pros as to how IE is being used in their deployment with real-time user date.

Extended Enterprise Site Discovery support for IE8, IE9, and IE10 proves IE will be around for a while

The IE team does point out that once the update is collected from the Enterprise Site Discovery Toolkit, most of the above features will be turned off by default. When enabling the features, IT pros will be able to collect data from all sites visited by users with IE except for those browsing in an InPrivate browsing session. The information gathered is done so silently, and there is no end-user notification so employees can continue with all that productivity they should be doing.