Removing -ms-high-contrast and embracing standards-based forced colors in Microsoft Edge

The Edge team is excited to announce that the non-standard -ms-high-contrast media feature and -ms-high-contrast-adjust property are now completely removed from Edge, starting with version 138.

The road to removing these CSS features began just over a year ago with the introduction of the standards-based forced colors feature. When we shipped this new standard in Chromium-based Edge for the first time, we also wanted websites that still used the -ms-high-contrast media query and the -ms-high-contrast-adjust property from Internet Explorer and EdgeHTML to have time to migrate.

With the deprecation period now complete, we are looking forward to seeing more web developers move to the new forced colors feature, which is currently supported in Chromium-based browsers and Firefox.

With this change, the browsing experience of people using Windows contrast theme will be consistent between Edge, other Chromium-based browsers, and Firefox, creating a more interoperable experience between browsers that support forced colors mode.

If you believe your site could be impacted by the removal of the non-standard -ms-high-contrast properties, check out our initial deprecation announcement to learn more about testing your site with contrast themes enabled, and using the new standard forced colors mode properties.

Let us know how things go

If you encounter any issues as a result of the deprecation, please send us feedback in either of these two ways:

• To send us feedback directly from Microsoft Edge: go to Settings and more (…) > Help and feedback > Send feedback.
• Or, to report a problem directly with the Chromium implementation of the new forced colors mode standard, create a new issue using Chromium’s bug tracker.