On 10/19/20 Microsoft announced a plan which will take place in the next stable major release of Microsoft Edge. Users on Internet Explorer when they encounter a site incompatible with the browser will be prompted to continue in Microsoft Edge.
Microsoft says:
The following browsing data will be imported: Favorites, Passwords, Search engines, open tabs, History, settings, cookies, and the Home Page.
and
Even if they don’t give their consent by checking “Always bring over my browsing data and preferences from Internet Explorer”, they can click Continue browsing to continue their session.
So this means a few things for analysts and developers…
- Cookie are copied, so the same session may be displayed over multiple browsers (IE and Edge).
- After the redirection to Edge, the user is apt to run head long into Edge’s anti-tracking protection feature set.
This means that for any existing IE traffic that gets redirected, it is very likely to see a reduction in advertising attribution and return on ad spend because various advertising trackers will be denied access to the cookies (even if they were copied) due to low site engagement (which I am assuming because if they were on IE 11, they likely aren’t using Edge often enough to maintain a high site engagement score).
The above changes will take place with Microsoft Edge Stable Release 87.
Should you want to disable the feature on your machine(s), please see the associated help article.