CODEWITHSUNDEEP
office-js
Felipe Costa Gualberto
Felipe Costa Gualberto

Reputation: 1107

Engine of Office Addins in Windows Desktop

Is there any plan to upgrade Windows Desktop host engine from Internet Explorer to Edge or something better?

IE doesn't support the new wave of ECMAScript concepts, and that would impact TypeScript, that is the best way I learned to code Office Addins. Also, there are a number of security reasons why IE should not be used anymore.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 80

Answers (1)

Marc LaFleur
Marc LaFleur

Reputation: 33094

This topic comes up fairly often and while there would be some notable benefits to using Edge, it presents a number of non-trivial challenges. The most prominent being that Office 2016 supports Windows 7, 8, and 10 while Edge is only available on 10.

Leveraging Edge would require each Office application to support two distinct embedded browsers dependent on the version of Windows it is installed on. More importantly, even if this path were taken you would still need to support IE as your add-in could be run in either environment (not to mention the Online and Mac editions).

As to the TypeScript question, this issue has been with us for a long time. As much as we all would love to start using new features like mix-ins in our web apps, the nature of JS in the wild will always present challenges. It takes a long time for new ECMA features to become widely available across browsers and platforms. ECMAScript 6 was finalized in 2015 and we're still short of 100% coverage

Upvotes: 3

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