Forum Discussion

Copper Contributor

Apr 22, 2020

Solved

IE Compatibility Mode Pop-up Issue

We are experiencing an issue with a website that must run in Internet Explorer Compatibility Mode. Performing different functions on the site causes a pop-up window. The pop-up is required to perform...

Michael Griffith
Oct 28, 2020
I'm sorry that I never came back to give an update. Microsoft Premier Support spent a lot of time helping me. We ran all sorts of trace tools and gathered logs. Unfortunately, my problem lies with the third-party application developer. Microsoft cannot see into the developer's ActiveX code, but they believe that it includes a window.focus command for both the application and its pop-up. They think that the two get in a race condition and the IE window is winning which hides the pop-up.

ssmole5

Microsoft

Apr 25, 2020

Thanks for the updates, we're able to narrow down the scenario a lot. Now we know the popup is a dialog window shown from an ActiveX control, it's showing up behind Edge, and you can only get the dialog to show in front of Edge via the task manager. The thing about ActiveX controls is they can do just about anything, which makes it hard to diagnose from symptoms alone. We could find out with a repro

Can you confirm that the dialog is initially showing behind Edge? That's a symptom I've never heard of before so I wanted to double-check, I've heard of similar issues where the dialog shows in front of Edge but ends up behind if you alt + tab away and back again. We have a fix for a related dialog issue reaching canary builds next week, but it doesn't sound like the same issue after clarifying the details.

You say "The pop-up is not modal." but "Edge is completely frozen including the minimize button", which either means the popup is modal or Edge is hanging after showing the popup. In standalone IE, when the popup is shown can you minimize IE (or switch tabs or anything)? If not, than I would consider it a modal dialog 😀.

Assuming the dialog is modal and it's showing up behind Edge, I would want to debug the dialog HWND styles & relationships (like the class of the owner) with spy++, or we could write a small program to dump it via winapi to identify the scenario a bit more for us. But that sounds pretty difficult to arrange. We can think about it for next week

Michael Griffith

Copper Contributor

Apr 25, 2020

ssmole5, Thank you for sticking with me.

I can see the pop-up for a split second before it disappears. I'm assuming it is behind Edge because clicking Bring to Front in Task Manager brings it back. I tried Internet Explorer, and I cannot click anywhere in IE while the pop-up is open. Please let me know if there is anything you want me to try.

fixitben
Copper Contributor
Oct 28, 2020
Michael Griffith I am seeing the same thing with an active X application with pop up windows.
- Michael Griffith
  Copper Contributor
  Oct 28, 2020
  I'm sorry that I never came back to give an update. Microsoft Premier Support spent a lot of time helping me. We ran all sorts of trace tools and gathered logs. Unfortunately, my problem lies with the third-party application developer. Microsoft cannot see into the developer's ActiveX code, but they believe that it includes a window.focus command for both the application and its pop-up. They think that the two get in a race condition and the IE window is winning which hides the pop-up.