Deprecation of IE Browser Control
- AFo Team
- Nov 7
- 3 min read
Updated: Nov 14
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.
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.
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:
|
Has anybody been able to get an .mhtml (Web Page, Single File) to render properly in the Edge Browser Control ? It appears native MHTML rendering isn’t supported. Opening the same file directly in Edge, it loads correctly as intended.
Hi,
According to my latest information, the new browser control in Access 2010 is not functional.
We use the 32-bit version of Access 2010 in all cases where a 64-bit version of Office is already installed on the customer's system (our software currently only runs with Access 32-bit).
If the ‘old’ browser control also ‘dies’ in Access 2010, that's history.
Best regards,
Stephan
With the Edge Browser control, RetrieveJavascriptValue does not work when populating the control dynamically. The IE Browser control did not have this issue when using the DOM. To reproduce the issue:
1) Set the EdgeBrowserControl ControlSource = "about:blank"
2) In VBA, after ensuring the EdgeBrowserControl ReadyState = acComplete, run this sequence:
html = "<html><head><title>My Title</title></head><body></body></html>"
js = "document.open(); document.write('" & html & "'); document.close();"
Call Me.EdgeBrowser.ExecuteJavascript(js)
Do While EdgeBrowser.ReadyState <> acComplete
DoEvents
Loop
title = Me.EdgeBrowser.RetrieveJavascriptValue("document.title")
' ERROR: title will always be returned as the below error instead of the expected "My Title":
"RetrieveJavascriptValue timed out. Please verify the JavaScript expression supplied is valid."
I use the IE browser control extensively in my Access apps—my entire interface is run on it. And I do a lot of dynamic insertion of controls using Object.Document and the MSHTML model. I would really need the existing VBA model ported to the Edge browser or everything I have stops cold.
Although I agree that only a limited range of file types are available in the Edge browser control, PDF file viewing is supported, both for online and local files.
The workaround for speeding up the loading of local files is to edit the hosts file by adding the line 127.0.0.1 msaccess. However many users will be unaware of this simple solution or reluctant to make such a change. It would be very helpful if a future Office update could add this line if it doesn't exist.