TLS 1.0 and 1.1 security for Microsoft browsers changes coming, but delayed

It’s been almost a year and a half since Microsoft first announced that they will disable Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.0 and 1.1  during the first half of 2020 by default for Microsoft’s browsers. However, with the impact of Covid-19 still in effect for many of us, Microsoft has announced that they will be postponing the planned change to later this year to minimize any potential disruption to their users.

For Microsoft Edge (Chromium), TLS 1.0 and 1.1 are designed to be disabled by default with Microsoft Edge version 84, which is currently planned for July 2020.

For Internet Explorer 11 and Edge legacy edition, the designed disable date is September 8, 2020.

It is important to note that for many people the impact of this change will be minimal and by moving to TLS 1.2 Microsoft is doing us all a favor and improving the cryptographic protocol used to transport data over the network. Today, TLS 1.2 is already supported by most modern browsers. More importantly, this change ensures that a user’s browser experience remains seamless.  Services such as PayPal, Stripe, UPS, and others have indicated that they already support version 1.2 and will soon begin refusing older TLS 1.0 connections.

Users can also “re-enable” the previous versions of TLS in Microsoft’s browsers, but Microsoft strongly recommends that organizations move off of the previous versions as quickly as possible.