First posted to MSDN on Nov, 12 2013
With Internet Explorer 11, we invested a lot in improving the overall compatibility of web sites. In my experience, the single biggest change we made was to the user agent string.
The IE11 user agent string no longer contains the string MSIE
. This has turned out to be terrific for sites which used to black list us – we now get the same HTML that every other modern browser gets. However, it’s been somewhat less great (that’s a euphemism for “I want to punch my browser!”) for sites that white list and only provide HTML to a list of sites which is on a white list. I’ve had a ton of success with using the F12 tools and just changing the user agent string to IE10 (or even hand-modifying it to just include MSIE at all), but clearly that’s a burden that a typical user is never going to endure.
We wanted to make things a whole lot easier, and have them work by default. But the web is a big place, so crowd sourcing is a really effective way to figure out where to focus our attention.
We’ve launched a page on modern.IE where you can report sites which have a problem:
http://www.modern.ie/en-us/compat-issue-report
We are listening, and working with sites to update (and leveraging compat features in the browser in the interim). Got a problem? Report it! And I may even debug it for your personally. Or, if you’re lucky, somebody who is actually smart will.
