Google is broken in IE11 on Windows 8.1

http://betanews.com/2013/10/19/google-is-broken-in-ie11-on-windows-8-1/

by petrel • 13 years ago

23 14 13 years ago

betanews.com

InternalRun• 13 years ago

If you disable the IE compatibility list it should work fine.

josteink• 13 years ago

Other submission with more comments and link to original bug-report:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6576317

full-of-foo• 13 years ago

Oh Microsoft, you so funny

kamjam• 13 years ago

If you read the comments then you'll realise it's actually Google sending down crap:

I opened up Wireshark and found that IE was sending a user agent string of "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0)".

Making Firefox use that string causes Google to mangle the page exactly as shown in your screenshot.

It's apparently the "Trident/7.0" part that throws Google off, because if I manually change just that part to Trident/6.0 it works fine.

cbr• 13 years ago

IE is sending "Trident/7.0" with "MSIE 10.0" but IE11 isn't supposed to include the "MSIE" string anymore.

hrish2006• 13 years ago

IE is broken in Windows since Windows 98.

louthy• 13 years ago

Works fine for me, although there are plenty of sites that don't.

Chirael• 13 years ago

IE11 -> Tools -> Compatibility View Settings. Remove check on "Use Microsoft Compatibility lists".

math0ne• 13 years ago

No problems here, been using google extensively on IE11 8.1

vsansevero• 13 years ago

I found that if you go into "Tools" on the "Menu Bar" and click on "Compatibility View settings" and then un-check the "Use Microsoft compatibility View" the problem goes away as noted below by Chirael.

anonymous• 13 years ago

MS-DOS ain't done...

Stratoscope2• 13 years ago

...until Lotus won't run.

It's a cute saying, but almost certainly apocryphal:

http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done...

Microsoft has always put a lot of work into keeping applications running in new OS versions. Raymond Chen has chronicled these efforts over the years in his blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/

Many of the compatibility problems have been from apps that used undocumented features or APIs, or made bad assumptions about APIs. So Microsoft has put in compatibility shims and workarounds to keep these apps running.

Every time Raymond describes one of these hacks, there are comments about how they're just adding cruft and bloating Windows, and even worse they're encouraging developers to be lazy or overly clever, and they should just let the apps break so people won't do that.

His reply is always the same: when a customer upgrades Windows and their apps break, they don't blame the app, they blame Windows.

Of course something did break here. Nobody's perfect.

edtechdev• 13 years ago

The update also makes Chrome blurry (and other apps like Steam)

You have to right click the Chrome desktop icon -> properties -> compatibility -> disable display scaling

Then go to Chrome settings -> advanced settings -> increase font and/or zoom

Stratoscope2• 13 years ago

In Windows 7 and 8 there is a way to disable the blurry display scaling globally: In the display control panel's Custom DPI Setting dialog, select "Use Windows XP style DPI scaling". Then for the few apps that don't look good this way, you can go into their properties and enable display scaling there.

Unfortunately they took this feature out in 8.1. It defaults to blurry scaling globally with no way to override this, so you have to go into the properties for each and every app that looks blurry and disable scaling individually.

Of course all of this applies only if you do use a custom DPI setting. At the default 100% it doesn't do any scaling.

Google is broken in IE11 on Windows 8.1

Related Stories