Deprecation of IE Browser Control

At the German Access Developers Conference AEK27 on October 18, 2025, the Microsoft Access product manager, Linda Cannon, made a surprising announcement - the Trident engine (engine behind the old IE web browser control) will be phased out by June 2026! This means that at that time the old web browser control in Access will no longer work.

Listen to the live announcement from AEK27

Why is this announcement a surprise?

The retirement of the Internet Explorer 11 desktop app was announced in May of 2021. Back in March 2022, then product manager for Access, Michael Aldridge, addressed concerns from the Access community about what this retirement meant for Microsoft Access apps in this Tech Community blog post. There he reassured us that we had until 2029 before the MSHTML (Trident) engine is no longer supported.

In fact, on Microsoft's official Q&A article on the IE Desktop App Retirement, which as of this writing has not been updated since May 2023, it is still claiming in the section How long will IE mode be supported? that support will last at least through 2029 due to Windows product lifecycles. It further states that we will get at least one year of notice before retirement.

It seems that although Microsoft will continue to support IE mode from Microsoft Edge through the above time, individual Microsoft applications, like Microsoft Access are choosing to remove Trident-based features earlier. The primary reason is heavy targeting by threat actors.

As Linda indicates towards the end of the video, this is very recent news for the Access team. They will be blogging about the topic soon. Then we should learn how the removal will be carried out and for which versions of Access it will be relevant.

What are the problems with the Edge browser control?

The Edge browser control, currently available in Access 365 and 2024 versions, was introduced in 2023 at first only in the 365 version.

Edge Browser Control

It is based on the WebView2 Edge Chromium so it can handle modern CSS and JavaScript. However, the control initially had many bugs and has some limitations by design, e.g.

• navigation to different URLs and redirects only if entered in the Trusted Domains table

• more difficult and restricted programming with the loss of the Object.Document

• various timing and stability problems

• slow display of local files

Over the past two years, we have seen many reports that problems like that prevented people from switching to the new control.

Hurry up to report your obstacles for the transition!

The question is to what extent this is still true today, after many bugs have been fixed in 2023 and 2024 (search for "Edge" there) and workarounds for some of the restrictions have been found.

In the video, Shane Groff asks for reports of current problems with the switch. If you have any, feel free to leave them here below as a comment so that we can discuss them and report them to Microsoft. Now is the right time to do so! Then it may still be possible for the Access team or the community to find solutions before the old control is discontinued.

Update, Nov 14, 2025

We discussed the points raised in the comments so far with the Microsoft Access team. Here are the results:

• The IE control will be completely removed, not just the web related functionality.
  

• Since the slow loading of local files in the Edge control is a barrier to switching for many people, the Access team will try to speed up loading in the Edge control before the IE control is removed.

  
  

• The Access versions in which the IE control will be removed have not yet been finalized. It is planned for Access 365 and 2024. 2021 is still being discussed. It is not planned to remove the IE control in older versions that are out of support (Access 2019 and earlier). However, these versions may be affected whenever changes happen to the Trident engine in Windows.

  
  

• The Microsoft Access team will publish further details in an upcoming blog post. Feel free to post any other questions or obstacles to switching here.