IE 11 Breaks Rendering For Google Products, and Outlook Too

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from The Register: "The Windows 8.1 rollout has hit more hurdles: the new version 11 of Internet Explorer that ships with the operating system does not render Google products well and is also making life difficult for users of Microsoft's own Outlook Web Access webmail product. The latter issue is well known: Microsoft popped out some advice about the fact that only the most basic interface to the webmail tool will work back in July. It seems not every sysadmin got the memo and implemented Redmond's preferred workarounds, but there are only scattered complaints out there, likely because few organisations have bothered implementing Windows 8.1 yet." Also from the article: "Numerous reports suggest that IE 11 users can once again enjoy access to all things Google if they un-tick the IE 11 option to 'Use Microsoft Compatibility lists.'" And here's Microsoft KB work around.

Comments

Hmm...

[DrPBacon]

I guess they were too busy building http://www.hover.ie/ ...

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

This has nothing to do with Android. Even if it did, it's not pure Linux. Nothing you said is useful.

Great article explaining what has changed

[Anonymous Coward]

See this article for how the IE11 User Agent string has changed, and how MS has removed a lot of the old non-standard IE ways of doing things.

Re:Great article explaining what has changed

[IamTheRealMike]

Yeah, that's great, except that in the real world apps like Gmail have to support all kinds of wacky browsers, including old ones that get kicked to "legacy" UIs, mobile browsers, browsers that are technically standards compliant but are much faster or slower than other browsers and so on.

I used to work on a server that vended browser specific code based on the user-agent (for a variety of reasons it had to be browser specific choices on the server side). It was a server that vended some self contained code that got embedded into lots of different web sites and properties. Anyway, the most painful browser to support was by far Internet Explorer. It blew my mind how badly they managed to screw this up. It's not that modern IE's are bad browsers, you see, they aren't really - after letting the web rot for years they finally reacted to their retreating market share by staffing up the IE team again, and nowadays it can render things nice and fast. The problem is their totally broken compatibility architecture.

Modern Internet Explorers are not a single browser. They're actually a wrapper around multiple different versions of the IE rendering engine, along with a horrific pile of heuristics, hacks and magical downloaded lists to try and select the right one. There's actually a giant flow chart that tries to describe what combination of bugs IE will try to emulate in any given situation, although that dates from 2010. Undoubtably it's now even more complicated. This is a total disaster. Firstly, IE isn't capable of always doing the right thing - a notorious example being the case where a top level document requests one kind of "document mode" (i.e. Trident version) and then an iframe requests a different kind, well, Trident can't recursively embed old versions of itself, so the iframe'd document just doesn't get the docmode it requested. If your code is run inside an iframe the only way to find out what docmode you're actually running in is to test it on the client side using JavaScript! If you then discover you have the wrong version of your JS loaded because IE lied to you, well, tough luck. Time to go reload it.

Combine this with trying to run code iframed into sites like Blogger where users are allowed to control their own toplevel HTML, and you can just forget about anything sane happening. But it gets even more confusing, because new versions of the rendering engine still have "quirks mode". You pretty quickly find yourself having to draw up giant matrices of how IE might behave in any given scenario.

What's worse, there are lots of different ways to ask IE for a specific mode. There are META tags, magic HTTP headers, DOCTYPE tags, and this Microsoft compatibility list which can override those in various situations, except that it works on a per domain basis and sites like google.com have tons of different apps hanging off different endpoints, some of which might no longer be really maintained, requiring a "flag day" where everyone co-ordinates to prepare for changes in the compatibility list. Oh yes, and users can and do modify their browser settings (as we see in this story), resulting in yet another column in the compatibility matrix.

Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera ... none of these browsers were such a nightmarish acid trip. Microsoft managed a seemingly impossible feat - dramatically improving the quality of their core rendering engine and yet STILL being the most horrible browser for web devs in existence! They snatched defeat from the claws of victory!

Re:What changed?

[Animats]

The Microsoft KB says that all they changed was the user-agent string, taking out the "MSIE". Changing it back supposedly makes Google work. This implies Google has special-case code for Internet Explorer. I thought that went out with IE 6.

Use market share properly

[aepervius]

If you show only 1 month sure XP is stomping Win8. But the real statistic is when you show the last 12 month. In 11 month win 8 rose from 0% to 7.5% and is not slowing down in the last month. In the same time windows XP dropped from 27% to 20%. Win7 stayed stable. So what does it says me ? Everybody getting a replacement is getting win8. Win8 will in time, maybe 1 year, maybe 18 month, win and XP disappear. So your reference to the statistic was misleading.

That said, we can all agree win8 UI is a piece of crap for desktop.

Re:I'd worry about this

[_xeno_]

I have a Samsung laptop and upgraded it to Windows 8.1 too.

The short answer is you're fucked. The laptop will not work with Windows 8.1.

The longer answer is that as part of the upgrade, Windows 8.1 installs broken display drivers. You need to disable the AMD graphics device in order to restore functionality. Unfortunately working drivers are flat-out not available on Samsung's site, and it's no longer possible to enter Safe Mode in Windows 8/8.1 by pressing F8 while it starts.

Instead, start it booting and then IMMEDIATELY hold down the power button. The idea is to get it to power off while Windows is starting, forcing it to allow you to choose to enter Safe Mode. Once you do that, you can go to the Device Manager and disable your AMD graphics.

At this point you'll have a working laptop that runs really, really badly. Anything you used to use accelerated graphics for is fucked.

But, hey, working. Sort of.

Re:I'd worry about this

[_xeno_]

Aw man, you're fucked. And just because it's hilarious, here's the official way to enter Safe Mode in Windows 8 and 8.1:

From the Power menu, hold down Shift while selecting Restart.

Those who know Windows 8/8.1 you will realize that the "power menu" is the menu available either via the power button in the login screen or the power button in the Settings charm in the charm bar.

And that you need to have already booted Windows successfully in order to use it.

Meaning that the only way to force Windows 8/8.1 to boot into Safe Mode is to first boot successfully, thereby not needing Safe Mode in the first place.

The way I got my ATIV Book 6 "working" was because it spent enough time at the boot screen that turning it off during that was able to force it into "recovery mode" that let me choose to boot into Safe Mode.

Also, the BIOS key on the ATIV Book 6 is F10, so you might try mashing that while pressing the power button to see if that works. It won't help you get into Safe Mode to actually fix anything, of course, but might let you boot from other devices.