Compatibility guidelines and best practices

By following good guidelines and best practices, you can avoid many common compatibility issues with Internet Explorer.

In this section

Topic	Description
Adapting tailored sites to support standards	By creating sites that support industry standards (such as HTML5, CSS3, DOM4, and so on), you extend your site's reach to include browsers that support the same standards, regardless of the underlying device, operating system, or form factor.
Building a touch-first site	Build touch-first sites for both Internet Explorer in the new Windows UI and Internet Explorer for the desktop.
Effective use of prerender and prefetch	Use prerender and prefetch to load pages quickly and keep your website or app working smoothly.
Migrating mutation and property change events to mutation observers	You can migrate existing code using mutation events and / or property change events to use mutation observers.
Update existing code to work across browsers	As you develop Internet Explorer apps, you must balance new features and functionality with site compatibility for existing webpages. Windows Internet Explorer 8 introduced document compatibility modes to help ease the transition from legacy implementations to the new standards.
Use feature and behavior detection	Rather than focus behavior specific to Internet Explorer 11 (or any other browser), you can use feature and behavior detection to write code that adapts reliably to cross-browser differences.