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sharepointsharepoint-2013office-jsoffice-addins

Can we force our Office task pane add-in to use IE11 rather than Edge?

My company has an internally developed Office task pane add-in that we host internally in a SharePoint 2013 add-in catalog, that is only used by employees on our network.

We noticed that recently the add-in began prompting users for a login, which has never happened in the past:

enter image description here

After doing some research, it seems that the combination of Windows and Office version we've recently upgraded to has resulted in Microsoft Edge being used to render the add-in from desktop Office programs (the only way our users consume the add-in). Previously, IE11 was used to render the add-in, and we had no problems with the users being prompted for a login.

The Microsoft documentation linked above has a note:

If your add-in includes the Runtimes element in the manifest, it uses Internet Explorer 11 regardless of the Windows or Microsoft 365 version. For more information, see Runtimes.

We have tried using the Runtimes element in our add-in manifest, but it has not worked. The task pane continues to render with Edge, prompts for a login, and shows a message like so:

enter image description here

Is there anything we can do within the manifest to force Word & Excel to use IE11 instead of Edge to render our add-in?

If we're forced to live with Edge, is there anything we can do to make it stop prompting for login each time the add-in is loaded?

Is there anything policy-wise our IT team can do to either force IE11 or get Edge to stop prompting for login? From my research, it seems that Edge has no concept of Trusted Sites.

Solution

  • I can give you a partial answer, but maybe not a solution:

    There is no way that you can control what browser is used on the user's computer.

    SharePoint add-in catalogs cannot be used for add-ins that use certain manifest XML that has been developed in the last few years. (I don't know why.) It looks like <Runtimes> is one of those.

    As for getting rid of the login prompt, If you don't get an answer here in the next few days, you could try raising an issue on the office-js repo.