Remove IE MSI

Internet Explorer was officially retired by Microsoft in June 2022, and Microsoft has since redirected IE usage to Edge and removed the IE11 desktop application from most supported versions of Windows via Windows Update. If you’re planning a Windows deployment today, you very likely don’t need to remove IE manually at all — it’s either already gone or in the process of being retired on your machines.

If You’re Still Managing Legacy Systems

For organisations still running IE11 on older or LTSC builds of Windows that haven’t received the retirement update, IE11 can be removed as an optional Windows feature rather than needing a separate uninstaller:

• Control Panel: Programs and Features > Turn Windows features on or off > untick Internet Explorer 11 > restart.
• PowerShell (run as Administrator): Disable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Internet-Explorer-Optional-amd64
• Group Policy / SCCM: the same optional feature can be disabled at scale via a script deployment running the PowerShell command above, which is generally more reliable for enterprise rollout than a legacy MSI uninstaller at this point.

Any older MSI-based IE removal tool referenced in this post historically predates IE’s official retirement and may not behave predictably on current, fully-patched Windows builds — the optional feature toggle above is the supported route going forward.

Still Need IE-Dependent Sites to Work? Use Edge’s IE Mode (Updated for 2026)

Removing IE11 outright is the right move for a general fleet, but if your organisation still has a legacy intranet application or vendor portal that genuinely requires the old Trident engine, the current supported path isn’t reinstalling IE11 — it’s Internet Explorer mode in Microsoft Edge, configured via the Enterprise Mode Site List policy so only specific URLs fall back to IE rendering while everything else uses standard Edge. Microsoft has committed to supporting IE mode through at least 2029, making it the durable option for the handful of stubborn legacy sites that would otherwise block an IE11 removal project entirely.

Resources

• MSI
• Group Policy
• Browse our Windows Admin Toolkit picks on Amazon

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