19 Oct 2023

How to Stop Internet Explorer from Redirecting to Edge

by | posted in: Technology | 0

If you’re using Windows 10 and find that Internet Explorer is redirecting you to Microsoft Edge for certain websites, follow these steps to prevent it:

Note

Early Microsoft Edge releases, it was only solution to stop Internet Explorer redirecting to Edge. But before a “problem” can be solved, it must be set.

SOLUTION 1

  • Open the Microsoft Edge browser on your Windows machine.
  • Click on the Menu (three horizontal dots) at the top right and select Settings from the list
  • Alternatively, you can directly open the default browser page by entering edge://settings/defaultBrowser in the address bar and pressing Enter.
  • In the Settings menu, click on the Default Browser option in the left panel.
  • Click the dropdown button next to the “Allow Internet Explorer to open sites in Microsoft Edge” option.
  • Select the option “Never” from the dropdown menu. Actually other Edge versions called “Do Not Allow“
  • See Screenshot 1 & 2, this won’t exist much longer
edge settings

Screenshot 1

edge

Screenshot  2

SOLUTION 2

Note

Early Microsoft Edge releases, it was solution used together with Solution 1 to stop Internet Explorer redirecting to Edge. But before a “problem” can be solved, it must be set.

  • Search for “Internet Options” or open it from Control Panel.
  • There, in the “Advanced” tab, disable option Enable third-party browser extensions.
internet options

Screenshot 3

WHY DOES INTERNET EXPLORER START MICROSOFT EDGE AUTOMATICALLY?

Internet Explorer sometimes launches Microsoft Edge automatically due to its lack of support for modern web technologies. Websites like Facebook and Instagram may not function properly in Internet Explorer. If a website is not compatible with Internet Explorer, it will open in the Edge browser instead.

For this redirection task, Edge adds an “IEToEdge BHO” plugin to IE, which cannot be disabled to prevent this feature.

SOLUTION 3

CAN I DISABLE THE IETOEDGE BHO PLUGIN FROM IE?

No, you cannot disable the IEToEdge BHO plugin because it’s enabled by default and Microsoft does not provide an option to disable it. Let’s take a look at the following and show you how to fix this.

INTERNET EXPLORER EDGE ADD-ON, BEGONE!

There are many websites that don’t work with IE at all (e.g. Twitter) or half-work (like Stack Overflow and YouTube). Many other websites warn that they’ll stop supporting IE soon.

So how do you turn this annoying new IE feature off? It is down to a new addon (BHO) called IEtoEdge, however you cannot turn it off through the GUI (Manage add-ons menu command), as all the buttons are disabled!

BHO

Screenshot 4

  • You need to locate a registry key called HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Ext\CLSID, then find {1FD49718-1D00-4B19-AF5F-070AF6D5D54C} (the clsid of IE_TO_EDGE_BHO.DLL) and set its value to zero
bhoregistry

Screenshot 5

Note

This hack won’t work past June 2023

To prevent Edge from hijacking Internet Explorer, you will need to deactivate the Internet Explorer plugin that is forcefully installed by Edge. To do that, please follow the below instructions with administrative privileges:

Go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\<a.b.c.d version>\directory
Locate a subfolder named BHO
Rename the BHO subfolder to BHO.bak
Now, when you start Internet Explorer (IExplore.exe) it will not be overtaken by Edge.

You can just rename these files to disabled.

bho pluggin

Screenshot 6

SOLUTION 4

CREATE AN INTERNET EXPLORER INSTANCE

  • Open your favorite text editor. In our case we are going to use Notepad++ (Screenshot 6)
  • Copy the VBScript code from below.
  • Paste the code in the newly created file.
  • Save the file with a “.vbs” extension
  • Run the script file by double-clicking on it or via the CMD console. (Screenshot 7)
' This script creates an MS Internet Explorer instance and navigates to a webpage.
Sub createAnInternetExplorerInstance()
	' Set variables
	Dim appInternetExplorer
	Dim strLinkToWebpage
	' Create new internet explorer application object
	Set appInternetExplorer = Wscript.CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application")
	' Set webpage link
	strLinkToWebpage = "https://www.msn.com/"
    	' Use the newly created internet explorer instance
   	 With appInternetExplorer
        	' Set window width
        	.Width = 1000
		' Set window height
		.Height = 500
		' Set window top position
		.Top = 0
		' Set window left position
		.Left = 0
		' Set visibility state
		.Visible = True
		' Navigate to webpage
		.Navigate strLinkToWebpage
    	End With
	' Release the internet explorer application object
	Set appInternetExplorer = Nothing
End Sub
' Run the procedure
Call createAnInternetExplorerInstance()
VBS SCRIPT

Screenshot 6

cmd script

Screenshot 7