One Great Tech - When IT Has to Work!

I've been seeing a quite a few customers having trouble with Internet Explorer 11. Most are people that have to use sites that haven't been updated to current standards, often for the past 5 to 10 years. In one case, an insurance agent needed to access insurance company websites and couldn't once Internet Explorer (IE) updated to version 11. Of course Firefox and Chrome didn't work either.

So, if you run into this problem, what do you do?

Well, if Internet Explorer was recently upgraded (automatically) to version 11, maybe you'd like to go back to your previous version, which (I presume) was working well for you. Here's how:

Go to Windows Updates (among other locations, you can find it in Control Panel).

In the lower left corner, click on Installed Updates.
Look for internet Explorer 11.
Click on Internet Explorer 11 then click “Uninstall” (up above the list).
It should lead you through removing it.

When it’s removed, restart the computer.

Once the computer is restarted, open Internet Explorer.

Click the little gear near the top right corner.
Choose About Internet Explorer.
It will show you here what version you have now.
If you have version 10, Uncheck the box for “Install new versions automatically” then click “Close” and you’re done.

If you have version 9, there is no check box for installing new versions. Just click “Close” and continue…

Go back to Windows Updates.
Click on the “__ important updates are available”.
In the list of available updates, find Internet Explorer 11.
Right click on Internet Explorer 11, then choose “Hide Update”.
Close Windows Update and now you're done.

So now that that's out of the way, what caused this problem?

Well, once Microsoft considered IE 11 an important update they pushed it out via Windows Update. The problem is that some backwards compatibility was removed in IE 11 as it was considered to no longer be necesssary. Although to us it looks like IE 11 is the problem, the real problem is that some websites haven't been updated to support moderns web browsers. Many of the sites that can't be used with the latest IE state that they require IE 7, 6, or even 5.5! Those old browsers can't even be run on Windows Vista, 7, 8, or 8.1, aren't updated anymore and really shouldn't be used by anybody! These same sites usually don't support Firefox or Google Chrome.

If a company's site is so old that they need you to use old insecure software to access them, the real question becomes, "should you really trust them with your data?" If they haven't spent any time or money updating their website in 5 years, how much do you think they spend on security? The answer is probably $0 and so you might want to take your business elsewhere.