Google is broken in IE11 on Windows 8.1 | Hacker News Reader

Google is broken in IE11 on Windows 8.1

betanews.com

23 pointspetrel14 comments

Open articleView on HN

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

MS-DOS ain't done...

...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.

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

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

No problems here, been using google extensively on IE11 8.1

IE is broken in Windows since Windows 98.

Oh Microsoft, you so funny

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com