In this tutorial I’ll explain what Enterprise Mode Site List for Edge (Chromium) is, why you should use it and how to enable it.
What is Enterpise Mode Site List for Edge?
Enterprise Mode is a feature build into the “new” Microsoft Edge Chromium that allows you to specify certain websites to render with the old Internet Explorer engine. It still looks like the site is opened in Edge but in the background it’s actually being rendered by IE.
Why should you use Enterpise Mode?
Everybody probably has this one internal site that still requires IE to function. You know the one, built in 1995 buy one guy that left the company 10 years ago. So to make the life of end users and yourself easier, you can use Edge Enterprise Mode. This way you can force Edge to render that specific site with the IE engine. This means that from now on, all your end users can Edge as their one and only browser instead of juggling between IE end Edge or even worse only using IE.
How to setup Enterprise Mode.
First of all make sure everybody is on the latest build of the Chromium based Edge, this will not work for the older Edge.
Creating the list
There are multiple ways of creating the XML that specifies which sites that need to run under IE. The easiest would be using the Enterprise Mode Site List Manager which you can download here
- Open the Enterprise Mode Site List Manager
- Click add
- Enter the URL of your website (I’ll be using google.com for this)
- Select Open in IE11
- Select the Specific IE version you need for the Compat Mode, this will of course differ from site to site.
- When all your sites are added go to file and save to XML
- Save this XML file to a location that everyone in your company has read rights to
Site list versions
In the Enterpise Mode site list you can see a version number on the right hand side. This number is important as Edge needs to check that number before it accepts the changes. This means that for every change you make that number needs to go up, otherwise Edge will not look at the changes. This works automatically when you use the Enterpise Mode Site List Manager, but you need to think of this when changing the xml file manually.
Setting up the Group Policy
- Install the Group Policy files you can find these here
- Create a new Group Policy
- Go to Computer Configuration -> Policies -> Administrative Templates -> Microsoft Edge
- Enable the ‘’Configure Internet Explorer Integration” Policy
- Enable the “Configure the Enterprise Mode Site List” Policy
- Place the path to the XML file in the options box
Testing the config
In order to see if Edge configuration is working, simply open Edge and go to the specified site. If everything is working as it should you should see a little Internet Explorer icon to the left of the URL.
If things are not working as expected you can go to edge://compat/enterprise. Here you can see if the policy is applied and if Edge is using the right version of the XML file.
