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I'm testing a page that I've changed on a website and chose to test variations in IE version - attempting to be good and ensure I've got tested everything.

Unfortunately I found a minor issue in IE8 and IE9 whereby some content doesn't seem to appear. Great - thats the point of the testing, next I need to find out why. I immediately launched jumped to the DOM explorer and noticed something weird:

The working IE10/IE11 DOM Explorer - I can correctly jump to an Element by selecting it on the page:

enter image description here

The IE8/IE9 DOM Explorer - selecting etc. doesn't work:

enter image description here

So IE9 is basically shown no DOM... although it's there because it's managed to parse and render pretty much the entire rest of the page. I've checked the console and I've no errors or warnings. I'm at a loss as to why this might occur and I'm reluctant to uninstall IE11 so I can install an older version.

Has anyone else seen this before / can you suggest any way to get the DOM explorer working?

Ian
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  • looks like a bug. So the error is in IE8 & 9 ? – Raptor Feb 18 '14 at 09:00
  • Is suggest writing a minimal example, you might find the answer yourself along the way. – Lie Ryan Feb 18 '14 at 09:01
  • @LieRyan: I would if that were practical but I've 1,300 lines of HTML and I've no idea what the problem is. There would be a crazy amount of trial and error to isolate the broken bit to build an example. – Ian Feb 18 '14 at 09:07
  • Umm, IE11 will ignore conditional comment, which ever "compatible mode" you're in; the only way I found to make it back is adding a `X-UA-Compatible: IE=8` header in the HTTP response, _in addition to_ choosing "Emulate IE8". – Passerby Feb 18 '14 at 09:08
  • @ShivanRaptor: A bug in the IE8/IE9 mode of IE11 Developer Tools maybe. The content that's missing is missing in those browsers yes. – Ian Feb 18 '14 at 09:08
  • @Ian From your screenshot I can see that in IE9 mode the browser isn't using the correct `` -- which is "expected" in IE11, and I think this may be the problem. Check out [this SO question](http://stackoverflow.com/q/19446584/570812) and [this Microsoft bug tracker](http://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/details/806767/conditional-comments-do-not-work-when-emulating-document-modes-via-f12-developer-tools). – Passerby Feb 18 '14 at 09:23
  • @Ian: that's exactly why producing a minimal example is important. 1300 lines of HTML is frankly not too big. Do a bisect removal, remove roughly half the code (taking care not to introduce syntax errors), see if problem persists, if the problem disappears, restore and remove the other half, if the problem disappear when either are removed then remove the middle parts that looks like it should be correct, repeat until you can no longer remove anything else while keeping the issue. With 1000 lines of code, you should have whittled it down to few tens of lines within about ten steps. – Lie Ryan Feb 18 '14 at 09:23

1 Answers1

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I managed to reproduce this on another site and have submitted a bug to the IE team which you can see here

Ian
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  • I see the same. At the moment I can't bring up the DOM without switching back to "Edge", but I'm fairly certain that yesterday the DOM explorer showed me content after a simple page refresh. – shannon Mar 08 '14 at 05:37
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    Odd, now it's back again... just a couple of refreshes and document mode switches. Magic. – shannon Mar 08 '14 at 05:42