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A More Compatible IE9, Through Your Feedback

  • Article

Throughout IE9, we have written about how
users and
developers expect browsers to be compatible with the sites they use
every day. This blog post covers a few ways we measure and ensure compatibility
with the Web and how
your feedback made a
difference.


Measuring compatibility with the Web

We measure Web compatibility through many different mechanisms. These include:

  • Customer feedback: Most important, we listen and act on feedback from the
    community. With 33 million downloads of IE9 Beta and RC, users logged over
    23,000 bugs. That’s over six times the amount of feedback we received in
    previous versions (Users logged more bugs for IE9 in part because we made it easier
    by
    opening the Connect program to everyone).

  • Professional testing: We test thousands of high traffic sites on a regular
    basis. These sites are popular with users and important to daily life around the
    world.

  • Telemetry: Across hundreds of billions of browsing sessions, we gather telemetry
    data when users click the Compat View button. We use this data to determine what
    additional sites to test and add to the
    Compatibility View (CV) List.

We use all of this data, analysis, and testing to improve IE9’s compatibility with
the Web. We also use it to determine what sites are added and removed from the CV
List. For example, thanks to your feedback, we removed hundreds of sites that have
updated since Beta such as bankofamerica.com
and washingtonpost.com. This helps ensure
that all users have the best browsing experience with these sites.


New for the IE9 Compatibility View List

We made three improvements to the IE9 CV List between Beta and the final release:

  1. The IE9 CV List includes the
    software fallback list for GPU/drivers, which you can find at the end of
    the CV List xml file.
    This means we can update the CV List to provide users with a better browsing experience
    within days of discovering GPUs or drivers that are incompatible with IE9.
  2. The IE9 CV List includes subdomain support. This enables IE to run a specific subdomain
    in a compatible document mode, while keeping the rest of the domain running in the
    latest Standards mode.
  3. F12 Developer Tools tells site developers when sites are on the
    IE9 CV List, their
    local CV List, or a
    Group Policy-configured CV List, as shown in the screen shot
    below.

Screen shot of F12 Developer Tools showing console message that traderjoes.com is on the Internet Explorer 9 Compatibility View List


Ensure the best experience for your site

In closing, please continue to
verify your site works well with IE9. Start by sending IE9 the
same standards-based markup and script you send other browsers, and
use
feature detection, not browser detection. Check to make sure your site is
not on the CV List.
If it is, that means customers have reported incompatibilities with your site and
IE9. To be removed from the CV List, test your site with the CV List off (Press
“F12” to bring up F12 Developer Tools and select “IE9” from the Browser Mode menu),
and
update your site to be compatible with IE9. When you have verified that
your site works in IE9 Browser mode, email iepo@microsoft.com
with the information at the
bottom of this Web page and ask for your site to be removed from the IE9
CV List.

—Marc Silbey, Program Manager, Internet Explorer

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 01, 2011
    Instead of reviewing telemetry from hundreds of billions of browsing sessions and maintaining an extensive compatibility view list, wouldn't it be easier just to distribute Firefox 4 with Windows? You'd get better site rendering and support for more versions of Windows.

  • Anonymous
    April 01, 2011
    Good one, George.  Happy April Fool's (fool).  lol

  • Anonymous
    April 01, 2011
    @George Smith That used to be funny some time ago. But it's not anymore..

  • Anonymous
    April 01, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2011
    No, it's still funny.  Mostly because it's true.

  • Anonymous
    April 03, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 04, 2011
    One thing I am wondering about IE9 is will it override customer error screens the way IE8 does?  What I mean is that if my site returns status 500 but sends an HTTP response with HTML, IE8 throws away the HTML and gives the user Microsoft's standard error 500 page.  The result is with my applications (Intranet I'm talking here) the user has no idea what to do to fix the problem, and they can't send me a screenshot that is at all relevant to help fix it.  I have to go to FIREFOX and reproduce the error in order to get the real error screen since IE throws away the HTML when HTTP status is not 200.  Will IE9 keep doing this????

  • Anonymous
    April 04, 2011
    (see above) For example, if I have a java based application that encounters an error and returns a 500 status.  The HTML returned may say "Error. The server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request. java.lang.OutOfMemoryError    <>" which tells the user what the problem is and they can communicate to me via a screenshot or whatever what it was.  But if they go to the site through IE, they will get the worthless standard MS 500 screen and not know anything about the error being caused by java.lang.OutOfMemoryError.  This is very annoying to me.  If I wanted to hide my error messages I'd do it in the code.  I don't need Microsoft doing it for me.

  • Anonymous
    April 05, 2011
    jun: Your custom error page needs more text. The IE friendly error page is triggered when the server sends less than 512 bytes of HTML in response. blogs.msdn.com/.../http-error-pages-in-internet-explorer.aspx

  • Anonymous
    April 05, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 08, 2011
    IE9 does not work with FB games.Does not allow you to post or give gifts.Everyone I know that has installed IE9 has had same problems and have to use Google Chrome or they have restored thier comp back to the way it was prior to this IE9 mistake.

  • Anonymous
    April 09, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 10, 2011
    IE9 has a problem with js-sequences of document.open / document.close in a frame. After 24 open-close-loops it whitescreens without any error messages. Probably some memory issue. The XUE-header doesn't help, even without doctype the jR%^#(*^-browser still stays in IE9-mode. Why do people use this *** anyway?

  • Anonymous
    April 12, 2011
    I tried installing IE9 but it requires SP1 on my Vista. Tried to install update of SP1, but it always stops in the middle.

  • Anonymous
    April 12, 2011
    More compatible..? it took 3 years and compule of major releases. sad

  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2011
    IE-9's interface is ***, but they don't too much to worry about from the almost-as-buggy FF4.  FF 3.6 on the other hand...

  • Anonymous
    April 14, 2015
    Poesia ,semtimiento rap del coro cristiano apocalicse