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Enterprise Mode for Internet Explorer 11

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“I used to access to my internal portal everyday and now is not loading properly, how can I go back to IE8?”

This has been one of the most common complains about the usage of Internet Explorer 10 and 11 on Windows 8 for the last year, and the truth is that we have had some friction between the “Legacy Compatibility” and the “Modern Compatibility”.

Your old websites which are using hard-coded Active X controls, old scripting languages and remarkable plug-ins, heroes in another era, are struggling with the new browsers that are based on new technologies, are touch friendly and use more powerful and slightly different script engines. But, you want to take the full advantage of the new technologies.

That’s why we just brought the “Enterprise Mode” for IE 11.

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Open your Internet Explorer and press “Alt”, go to Tools and there you will find the Enterprise Mode, easy as that.

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According to Net Applications, Internet Explorer 8 still has more than 20% of the desktop browser market share; despite the fact that IE9, IE10, and IE11 have superseded IE8, many customers still rely on Internet Explorer 8 to run their business.

By providing better backward compatibility for Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 11 with Enterprise Mode is intended to help break this dependency and provide the best of both worlds: A modern, up-to-date browser that helps customers extend their existing investments in older Web apps.

What does Enterprise Mode provide in terms of compatibility?

  • User agent string differences: We have replicated the original IE8 user agent string so Enterprise Mode will make work sites that fail if they can’t recognize IE8 as the browser.
  • Active X controls and other binaries
  • Deprecated functionality, such as CSS Expressions
  • Pre-caching and pre-rendering

Also, why move to IE11 is a better choice? Performance

JavaScript performance in enterprise mode is slightly slower than IE11 but still much faster than IE8.

So now you don’t have an excuse for don’t move to a modern browser anymore :)

Documentation and Other Resources:

Build session- Better App Compat with Enterprise Mode IE11:  https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/2-559

IE 11 in TechNet: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/dn262703.aspx

TechNet contains updated information for exploring, planning, deploying, managing, and supporting Internet Explorer. 

A section on Enterprise Mode has been added to the Internet Explorer 11 Deployment Guide. 

The Build session on Better App Compat with Enterprise Mode for Internet Explorer 11 is available as a technical overview.

Public forums for discussing Enterprise Mode deployment, management, and best practices are available on TechNet Forums.