So if you are rolling out Lightning, you probably know by now that using Lightning with IE11 is unsupported.

This Knowledge Article explains the change and this Help Doc tells you about the supported browsers.

If you read into the knowledge article you’ll see that you can opt-in to using Lightning with IE11, but there are some caveats – NOTE THAT DURING THE EXTENDED PERIOD SALESFORCE WILL NOT PROVIDE TECHNICAL SUPPORT FOR ISSUES RELATED TO PERFORMANCE (no-one wants performance issues, winky winky).

We’ve always encouraged our users to use browsers other than IE11 but don’t have a way of enforcing it. To add to that, our company structure is pretty complex, and the team doesn’t have the ability to work with IT to remove or block IE11, so we were faced with a conundrum – how to ensure people don’t use IE11 so we can get them into Lightning?

The first thing we tried was a login flow to check for what browser the user is logging in with – we thought we could essentially block their login at that point and show them a message to use a different browser. But while we were testing we determined that detecting the user agent (browser) was going to be difficult since the user agent values themselves are long strings of jibberish.

So we stepped back and decided to get creative.

We have one profile that we wanted to default to Lightning and not allow them to switch back to Classic. That setting works great…unless the user logs in with IE11. Here’s what we did to get these users off IE11 and into Lightning:

• Created a Visualforce Tab Page that just tells the user they are using an unsupported browser and they need to use something other than IE11.
• For a week, we added that component to their Classic Home page to give them a chance to switch on their own.
• Then for that User Profile, we removed access to all Apps in Classic except for a single App. (this doesn’t affect the apps they have in Lightning)
• On the App that we left them, we removed all the tabs and defaulted the Home Page to the new Visualforce Tab.
• Then, just in case they had a bookmark to the home tab or in case they logged in with a link to record, we did a few more things in Classic:
  • Removed everything on their homepage sidebar so it’s blank (For this particular group of users, 90% of what they need when they login involves clicking a link on the sidebar so this was a definitely incentive!)
  • Removed the other home page components (except the VF page)

So essentially, when a user in this Profile logs in using IE11, it takes them directly to the Visualforce Tab with the page I created telling them to use a different browser. If they open the sidebar it’s blank. So they are pretty much forced to actually read the directions on the page and use a different browser.

I’m not promising they will read the directions. You’ll get tickets, and slack messages and emails asking why they aren’t seeing what they usually see.

But that’s a WHOLE other problem to solve!