It was recently discovered that you can still open Internet Explorer in Windows 11 by opening up Internet Options.
Now that I knew IE 11 was alive and well in Windows 11, I wanted to figure out a way to create a shortcut to also open it up. So, I launched Process Monitor and Internet Explorer 11 from Internet Options. Then, I filtered the data to just show me iexplore.exe.
Turns out, the command line that was being issued was "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" -Embedding, as can be seen in the screenshot below:
By pasting that in the run box, iexplore.exe did show up in task manager, but that was about it, no GUI appeared. So I thought, “what if I put something in front of the -embedding?”
So I tried iexplore yahoo -embedding
That successfully launched Internet Explorer and brought me to a Bing search page for Yahoo.
No matter what I put in front of -embedding I couldn"t actually get it to load into a webpage on launch other than a page not found or a Bing search.
Using what we now know, we can create a shortcut using "C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" yahoo -embedding
You can put whatever you want before the -embedding.
You now have a shortcut again for Internet Explorer! For how long, nobody knows.
I hope it should go without saying that you really shouldn"t use this for your day-to-day browser, but it was a fun challenge.