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some clients reported that our website do not work in IE11. we don't have access to their computer, so we asked for screenshot and we dig into our logs.

and found those clients' browsers sent the following agent string: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; .NET4.0E; .NET4.0C; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; CPNTDFJS; McAfee; GWX:QUALIFIED)"},

and from the screenshot, we can see our site layout is broken. so we come to a conclusion that those clients are using compatibility mode in IE11.

however, the clients checked and said they don't have compatibility mode enable, enterprise mode is not enabled either.

since we don't have access to clients computer, so would like to get idea from you guys and see if anyone know what else we should check or why this happens?

  1. only some clients are having this issue. and we could not reproduce it on our computer.

  2. currently on our website, we dont have set in page head, because we thought IE11 would be smart enough to use Edge as default.

  3. Clients said compatibility mode or enterprise mode is off. Could it be a cache or something else that is not visible on the surface?

really out of idea, please shed some lights. Thanks!

innek
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1 Answers1

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You haven't provided many details to work with, so what follows is just a guess. However, based on the descriptions you have provided, it seems like your site is being rendered in an older document mode. You can have your client check this by opening the F12 developer tools and going to the emulation tab. The document mode setting in particular should be instructive.

If that doesn't say "Edge", then that's likely why your layout is broken. You then need to determine why the page isn't being displayed in Edge mode. In my experience, this usually occurs when a) the page doesn't contain a <!DOCTYPE html> directive and b) is displayed on an Intranet. Why? Because c) By default, IE displays such pages in IE7 standards mode aka Compatibility View.

You mentioned that you don't set the page head. Per the W3C spec, this tells compliant browsers to display the web page in quirks mode, rather than standards mode.

If this is the problem you're running into, you should be able to fix it by:

  • Adding an HTML5 doctype to the source of your webpage; this makes your intent clear, rather than leave the rendering decision to the individual brower.
  • Configuring the webserver to issue a x-ua-compatible header when serving your page (with the content value set to IE=edge.
  • Asking your client to uncheck the "Display Intranet pages in compatibility view" setting (see earlier link).

This isn't the only cause. The client may have added the site to the list of pages to be served in compatibility view, the user may have adjusted their registry settings to display all sites in compatibility view, and so on.

However this should be enough information to help you begin to troubleshoot the problem. In short, you need to determine how the page is being displayed and why. (Note: The dev tools also provide hints about why the page is being displayed as it is.)

Hope this helps...

-- Lance

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Lance Leonard
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