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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.
I would say that Google web interfaces should not be the standard by which browsers should be evaluated, I've found they work badly in a lot of circumstances. Then again, the Hotmail website does too, so Microsoft is also pretty bad at depending on the quirky characteristics of its favorite browsers. I avoid Google UIs as much as I can, preferring to use alternative interfaces where available, simply because they are so poorly designed. While Google does some good things, the Ui has never been Google's strong suit.
Microsoft's own Dreamspark site (which is relatively simple) didn't work for me in IE11 the other day either. It was just things that should be straightforward in any browser, like clicking a button and having something download, or submit a form when I tried to update my user details, but no, in IE11, clicking said buttons just did nothing.
I had to use Firefox to download Microsoft's server OS and development tools.
That strikes me as a rather glaring problem.
I'm not sure I blame IE11 though, I can't fathom the kind of idiocy that results in creation of buttons on a webpage that do something so fancy in the background that it can actually not perform a simple action like submit a form or trigger a download. I'd expect any software company nowadays especially Microsoft to have at least some basic competence in web development including an understanding of making things like browser buttons work in a simple cross-browser compatible manner, but it seems not.
Have you tried FastMail? We updated the web UI today to make it work more efficiently on small screens (phones and the like), and it has a fairly complete keyboard shortcut set.
http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/21/faster-than-native-introducing-fastmails-new-mobile-web-interface/
Free trial, but definitely paid. You're the customer with us, not the product.
before you think it, i'm no MS shill, i use Linux and only Linux. that said, the MSIE team is doing it right this time with IE11.
while many people here are slamming on the basis of standards compliance, there is something you should know: it's broken because they are striving standards compliance.
as we all know, there are plenty of MSIE exclusive ways of doing things in the DOM and render hacks that have had to be done so you end up with code that has "browser detection" to apply browser specific hacks. MSIE is making a clean break from all of that. so all those IE only apps like Outlook Web App will now fail because all the IE specific stuff has been removed. they went so far as to remove "MSIE" from their user agent string to prevent any old code from detecting it as Internet Explorer.
IE10 user agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/6.0)
IE11 user agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv 11.0) like Gecko
so while it seems to have growing pains, as far as IE goes, IE11 is a step in the right direction.
some nice differences:
Deprecation of file:// based Proxy configuration scripts
Deprecation of document modes
Deprecated VBScript in IE11 mode pages
navigator.plugins -- now a supported extensibility point <-- ironically chrome is removing this support
ActiveX now behaves like a navigator plugin.
Silverlight plugin is not installed by default (they got Netflix to support HTML5 via Encrypted Media Extensions aka DRM in the HTML5 spec)
more info:
http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2013/07/02/internet-explorer-11-dont-call-me-ie/
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2013/09/24/internet-explorer-11-changelist-change-log.asp
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