Emulating the “non-Desktop Experience” in the Desktop Experience The new full-screen “fast and fluid” experience of IE10 on Windows 8 offers many improvements over Internet Explorer 10 on the Desktop (ranging from UX to Security), but one thing it lacks is the F12 Developer...

Ordinarily, Internet Explorer loads local HTML files in the Local Machine Zone. Locally-loaded HTML files are subject to the Local Machine Lockdown feature which prevents pages from running active content like JavaScript or ActiveX controls, showing the following notification: In order to...

This morning, someone asked me to look into a site-compatibility problem on a HTML5 demo site. When loading the site into IE9 and IE10, the F12 Developer Tools’ Script Debugger showed the following error: Now, obviously, IE does support getElementsByTagName, and I confirmed that the...

Gather round, young’ins, Grandpa Eric is going to tell you a story. Back in the old days, when I started writing software, programmers’ utilities were sold in boxes in retail stores. You’d plunk down your 149 bucks or whatever (in cash , kids, this was before credit cards got popular...

I continue to be amazed at how often site-compatibility issues turn out to have a root cause related to User-Agent sniffing. For instance, earlier this year, someone wrote into the comments section on one of my posts noting that the HTML5 canvas art site WeaveSilk.com wasn’t working in IE9....

I recently encountered a blog that isn’t looking right in IE9: The site renders just fine in other browsers, and when the page is put into Compatibility View by ticking the icon in the address bar: What’s going on here? It’s clear that a stylesheet isn’t...

Recently, during site-compatibility testing of IE9, we encountered a cool online game that does not load properly in Internet Explorer. Using the F12 Developer Tools’ Script debugger, the page immediately hits a script error (“ c00ce56e ”) while loading: A quick search on...

I recently heard from some users who are seeing lower-than-expected scores on the Speed Reading and FishIE Tank benchmarks. I went to check these tests myself and found that my laptop’s score was low. In fact, it was much lower than I’d seen last year. What happened? First, a bit of background...

One of the commonly reported bugs on Connect is that Google Image Search shows grey boxes for some of the images in IE9 Beta. I had a quick look at the site this afternoon, and I can easily reproduce the problem , as you can see in the screenshot below. Now, I tend to debug things first from...

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been exchanging mail with a webmaster (Vladimir) in Russia who reported that his customers were having problems using IE8 on Windows 7 to log into his website. His site uses HTTP Basic Authentication, so users are prompted to enter their credentials using the following...

As mentioned back in July , IE8’s new lookahead downloader has a number of bugs which cause it to issue incorrect speculative download requests. The “BASE Bug” caused the speculative downloader to only respect the <BASE> element for the first speculatively downloaded script file. Subsequent...

Sometimes, folks report crashes to the IE team that we are unable to reproduce internally. That’s usually because, as mentioned often, most crashes are caused by buggy browser add-ons. In some cases, however, crashes occur even when running with browser add-ons off , and if we cannot reproduce the...

In general, IE8 is a significantly faster browser than prior versions. We made a number of major investments throughout the browser’s code to help ensure that IE users will have a great real-world experience on the web. However, it is definitely the case that some users are experiencing abnormal and...