Category: Internet Explorer

One of the things you can and should do before moving to Windows 10 is to deploy Internet Explorer 11 on your existing machines. But if you think that means you are safe in terms of then moving to Microsoft Edge and be running with all the latest and greatest of web standard, you’d better think again. Why?

Well ever since Internet Explorer 8 the setting “Display intranet sites in Compatibility View” has been enabled. Really what that means is that although you have moved to IE11 the chances are very likely that all your LOB web apps and all intranet based sites have been running in IE7 mode the last 10 years or so, at least after moving to IE8. That’s not very good to be honest.

The solution to really be future-safe is to make sure to unset that setting to actually run all your sites in IE11 mode. This can of course be done using Group Policies by setting the policy “Turn on the Internet Explorer 7 Standard Mode” policy. However when doing that expect things to break so I strongly advise you do some thorough testing Before deploying that setting to your entire organization.

Consider the following scenario: A user has a Windows client running UE-V (User Experience Virtualization) and IE 11 and everything in regards​ to Enterprise Mode in Internet Explorer 11 is working fine. The user then gets a new machine or logs into another machine let it be a client or for instance Remote Desktop session and then Enterprise Mode in IE11 does not work at all. The URL:s defined in the Enterprise Mode XML ruleset file are not applied when the user browse a web application defined for Enterprise Mode.

The problem is a consequence of UE-V roaming the Enterprise Mode registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Enterprise Mode where it lists CurrentVersion with the current version of the XML file that is being used. So basically that means that Enterprise Mode think it has already applied the current ruleset although it has not.

Solution / Workaround

The workaround to prevent this scenario from happening is to exclude that registry key from being roamed. In the MicrosoftInternetExplorer2013.xml file scroll down to <Application> <Name>Internet Explorer 11</Name> and add an additional exclusion to the other exclusions already listed under <Registry>:

<Exclude>
<Path>Main\EnterpriseMode</Path>
</Exclude>

For users that are already affected by the problem one must delete the registry key mentioned above and make sure that it is not synced back from the IE package in the SettingsPackages location (MicrosoftInternetExplorer.Version11 package).

So the beta release of Internet Explorer 9 has been released for public download. I’ve only been using it for a very short period of time but I can really notice the improvements in performance. Download now from
http://windows.microsoft.com/sv-SE/internet-explorer/download/ie-9/worldwide

EDIT: Woohoo, finally a download manager within Internet Explorer. And that also means that the downloads are downloaded directly to the destination folder instead of passing through the Temporary Internet Files cache.

Some time ago I wanted to see a soccer game via Canal Digitals web service but as I am running Windows 7 on my Media Center connected to my TV the web service discovered this and did not let me play this using Windows Media Player and instead offered me to view it in Flash format. Viewing the game in Flash format really wasn’t the best in quality and as I and my co-watchers discovered the game was more or less unwatchable.

In halftime I had the time to do the necessary corrections to fool the web service into presenting itself as another operating system and Internet Explorer version. This made the Windows Media stream instantly and not to mention with much better quality. This is done easilty by changing the so called user agent string which is a string which presents certain information such as OS, web browser and version and some more info.

If you want to change the user agent string and fool a web site or service into thinking it is something it is not you can do this using one of the registry fixes found at http://www.enhanceie.com/ua.aspx.

As Internet Explorer 8 render web pages in a new way than previous versions of Internet Explorer there is a good chance that one or more web pages you or your users regularly visit are broken or not displaying properly in IE8. Fortunately there is a compatibility mode in IE8 that makes web pages render as though they were displayed in IE7. This action is normally a manual one and the main problem here is that very few users are aware of this compatibility mode. To alleviate problems for the end users you can control the settings and compatibility list of web sites using group policy objects.

Start the Group Policy manager and go to Computer configuration > Administrative templates > Windows Components > Internet Explorer > Compatibility view and there look for “Use Policy List of Internet Explorer 7 sites”. Add the URLs for the web sites that you want IE 8 to always render in IE7 mode.

Some time during the third quarter this year the next beta of Internet Explorer 8 will be released. Microsoft is already asking people, webmasters specifically, to update their web sites to be Internet Explorer 8 compatible. IE8 follow web standards in a new way and this causes quite a few web sites to look not so good in Internet Explorer 8 native mode.

Of course the best option is to make your web site follow the standards but in any cases where this is not possible, due to lack of time, money or knowledge there is a snippet of code that you can add to your web sites to make Internet Explorer 8 render them as if they were interpreted in Internet Explorer 7.

The below snippet of code must be placed directly after the <head> tag.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7">

Adding this tag is equal to running Internet Explorer 8 in the “Emulate IE7” mode.

More information: Your Web site may not display correctly in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1