In the light of Microsoft announcing the end of support for Internet Explorer 11 by MS365 products and the official guidance from MS for IE11 users to migrate to MS Edge, VMware has decided to end the support for IE11 by all active versions of the vSphere Client, starting from the next update in the release line of vSphere 7.0.
IE11 has been in a relative state of decline for a long time. Its usage has dropped to less than 2% worldwide according to statcounter. IE11 is prone to security vulnerabilities with recent example from January 2020. IE11 is severely lagging in technological coverage. It supports none of the new features of HTML5 introduced after the standard itself, lacks full support for CSS, WebAPI and WebGL.
Running vSphere Client on IE11 negatively affects the user experience due to performance and stability issues. The performance of the Client on IE11 is many times worse than on other supported browsers. The multitude of issues specific for the IE11 makes running vSphere Client on it significantly more problematic.
Considering all of the stated facts and the best interests of the customers VMware will remove IE11 from the list of supported browsers by the vSphere Client. This decision will apply for all currently supported versions of the vSphere Client and will take effect starting from the GA release of vSphere 7.0U2.
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