Internet Explorer 11 adventures
Wednesday, July 31. 2013
I've been using a Windows 8.1 preview for a while and being a web developer, I stumbled into couple of noteworthy issues with IE 11. See my previous entry about Win 8.1.
User-Agent string
There are pretty much 2 variants:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; .NET4.0E; .NET4.0C)
or:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
The only way I could get the "like Gecko" -mode enabled on a XHTML 1.0 -site, was from developers tools in the Edge-mode. My site also has a <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=9" /> in it, but removing or adding the tag does not seem to have any effect. I'm guessing, that Edge-mode works out-of-the-box only in HTML 5. The important thing to not here is, that IE 11 declares itself as a IE 7.0, but unlike a "real" IE 7, this has Trident rendering engine 7.0. Also there is declaration of a "real-version" or rv:11.0.
Emulating previous browser versions
Gone. The good thing is that F12 developers tools have been completely re-written, but it is impossible to get the classic standards selection. I found two discussions about that. First is from superuser.com and second from stackoverflow.com.
Microsoft's idea is to go to http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools and use their virtualization service / tools to use a proper old browser. My advice would be: just ignore anybody using the ancient crap. I'd draw the line on IE 9, it still is pretty popular browser, but on my statistics anything older than IE 8 are totally gone.
Getting Zend Framework 1 to detect IE 11 properly
On my projects I have the ZF 1 running. I've been using Browser Capabilies Project's browscap.ini on PHP. It has solid integration into ZF 1. The bad thing is that BCP is not well maintained anymore due to key persons losing interest into maintaining one. Anyway, here is my patch into 5020:
--- php_browscap.ini.orig 2013-07-31 16:20:08.749140271 +0300
+++ php_browscap.ini 2013-07-31 16:24:14.563058655 +0300
@@ -31179,6 +31192,64 @@
Platform="WinNT"
Platform_Version=3.1
+;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; IE 11.0
+
+[IE 11.0]
+Parent=DefaultProperties
+Comment="IE 11.0"
+Browser="IE"
+Version=11.0
+MajorVer=11
+MinorVer=0
+Beta=true
+Win32=true
+Frames=true
+IFrames=true
+Tables=true
+Cookies=true
+BackgroundSounds=true
+JavaScript=true
+VBScript=true
+JavaApplets=true
+ActiveXControls=true
+CssVersion=3
+
+[Mozilla/*(Windows NT 6.1*64*Trident/7.0; rv:11.0*)]
+Parent=IE 11.0
+Platform="Win7"
+Platform_Version=6.1
+Win32=false
+Win64=true
+
+[Mozilla/*(Windows NT 6.1*Trident/7.0; rv:11.0*)]
+Parent=IE 11.0
+Platform="Win7"
+Platform_Version=6.1
+
+[Mozilla/*(Windows NT 6.2*Trident/7.0; rv:11.0*)]
+Parent=IE 11.0
+Platform="Win8"
+Platform_Version=6.2
+
+[Mozilla/*(Windows NT 6.3*Trident/7.0; rv:11.0*)]
+Parent=IE 11.0
+Platform="Win8.1"
+Platform_Version=6.3
+
+[Mozilla/*(Windows NT 6.3; WOW64*Trident/7.0; rv:11.0*)]
+Parent=IE 11.0
+Platform="Win8.1"
+Platform_Version=6.3
+Win32=false
+Win64=true
+
+[Mozilla/*(Windows NT 6.3; Win64*Trident/7.0; rv:11.0*)]
+Parent=IE 11.0
+Platform="Win8.1"
+Platform_Version=6.3
+Win32=false
+Win64=true
+
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; IE 10.0
[IE 10.0]
The 2nd glitch is that ZF 1 heavily relies on seeing string "MSIE" in the UserAgent identification to determine, that we're talking about Internet Explorer. IE 11 doesn't state that anymore. It want's to be like Mozilla's Gecko-engine, and happily says so. My patch for ZF 1:
--- library/Zend/Http/UserAgent/AbstractDevice.php.orig 2012-11-16 17:23:41.000000000 +0200
+++ library/Zend/Http/UserAgent/AbstractDevice.php 2013-07-31 13:58:15.422657840 +0300
@@ -512,6 +512,19 @@
} elseif ($product == 'mozilla' && $result['browser_version'] < 5.0) {
// handles the real Mozilla (or old Netscape if version < 5.0)
$result['browser_name'] = 'Netscape';
+ } elseif ($product == 'mozilla' && isset($result['comment']['full']) &&
+ preg_match('#^([^;]+);.+Trident/(.+);\s+rv:(.+)#', $result['comment']['full'], $real)) {
+ // MSIE 10+ in native mode.
+ // In emulation mode, will match MSIE 7.0
+ $result['browser_name'] = "MSIE";
+ $result['browser_engine'] = "MSIE";
+ $result['browser_version'] = $real[3];
+ $result['browser_token'] = 'MSIE ' . $real[3];
+ if (isset($result['others']['full'])) {
+ $result['compatibility_flag'] = $result['others']['full'];
+ unset($result['others']);
+ }
+ $result['device_os_token'] = $real[1];
}
/** windows */
@@ -523,6 +536,8 @@
if (strpos($result['device_os_token'], 'Win') !== false) {
$windows = array(
+ 'Windows NT 6.3' => 'Windows 8.1',
+ 'Windows NT 6.2' => 'Windows 8',
'Windows NT 6.1' => 'Windows 7',
'Windows NT 6.0' => 'Windows Vista',
'Windows NT 5.2' => 'Windows Server 2003',
That makes ZF 1 react alike for IE 11 and all other versions before that. I did test that on IE 8, IE 9, IE 10 and IE 11. Also I confirmed that to function with IE 10 and IE 11 in IE 7 emulator mode.
64-bit process
Normally I run only 64-bit browsers. Google's crappy Chrome won't do that, so I try to stay away from it. Firefox has excellent spin-off project of CyberFox, most IE versions have 64-bit counterparts, Opera has 64-bit version. The thing with 64-bit browsers is that there are a number of exploits for browsers which are tailored to run on 32-bit processes.
Anyway, the story is that on Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 the tile-mode IE is always 64-bit, but desktop-mode is always 32-bit. Ghacks.net has a story about getting IE 10 in Windows 8 to run 64-bit in desktop-mode, but I fail to confirm the results.
On IE 11 I found a setting of "Enable 64-bit processes for Enhanced Protected Mode":
... I don't know how it should affect the browser behaviour. I'm still getting:
The root-process of IE seems to be 64-bit, but anything with a real web-page in it, is always 32-bit on desktop side. Tile-mode looks like this:
So, no avail for me. Any ideas are welcome.
