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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 guess they were too busy building http://www.hover.ie/ ...
Spent All My Mod Points
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.
Use IE to download your browser of choice.
Come on Microsoft, it is year 2013, 2014 almost. We are not in 2000 anymore, you can't just tell everybody to go screw themselves anymore and act like you are some kind of god. I don't think it is going to work as well as it used to...
http://slashdot.org/story/07/02/03/1524250/confidential-microsoft-emails-posted-online
http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t90205.html
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
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.
I've wished for a better UI for webmail for years, but I haven't found one yet that meets google webmail yet, FOSS or payware. The same applies to their web search, although duckduck has some nice change features added that google lacks. Unfortunately duckduck's search results are often not good enough so I have to google my query. I'd love to be able to get rid of google, but the fact is that it's hard to get a similar quality service with a similar or better quality UI.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
IE 11 ain't done until Google won't run.
Has a vaguely familiar ring...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
/. just doesn't go to 11. IE does, and it shows.
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.
Ever since I started doing web design for a living in 1998, I hated this crazy situation where one has to take into account all quibbles and arguments the software industry has internally and make up for it in your code. Now we are 15 years down the road, I've moved on to greener pastures, but I see the poor sods in web development are still stuck with the tantrums of yesteryear.
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.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
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.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
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
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The architecture of web applications on the client side is screwed up.
It was originally designed so non technical people could create content and now it's been pressed into service doing extremely complex things.
The web fucking sucks.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!