How to create a shortcut to open Internet Explorer 11 in Windows 11

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.

How to create a shortcut to open Internet Explorer 11 in Windows 11