IE mode troubleshooting 3 tips and 3 tricks

The end of support for the IE 11 standalone browser on most versions of Windows 10 is upon us.If you're a little late to the game and you have some legacy web apps or sites that require IE that's okay because the future of IE is in Microsoft Edge with IE mode.IE mode is going to be supported on some versions of Windows through at least 2029, giving you the time to modernize your apps to target Microsoft Edge natively with the chromium engine.Configuring IE mode and migrating to Microsoft Edge for your enterprise is pretty straightforward and we have many tools available to help with the different steps in the process.The links I'll describe are in the post description down below by the way.Check out aka.ms/IEmodeGuide for a high-level overview, or the self-service Configure IE mode Tool at aka.ms/ConfigureIEmode to set it up.You can also watch our earlier IE mode webinar post discussing the setup and configuration process at aka.ms/IEmodeWebinar.Finally, if you attempted to set up IE mode, and you're still running into some compatibility issues.reach out to my team, the App Assure team at aka.ms/AppAssure, where we can assist with getting your IE 11 web apps and sites running in Microsoft Edge with IE mode at no additional cost.You can check out our service description at the aka link.After working with over 600 customers on over 1,500 browser-related cases in App Assure, we've seen a few patterns.First, compat rates for apps and sites transitioning from IE 11 to IE mode in Microsoft Edge are extremely high.Around 99.6 percent of apps are expected to work with proper configuration.Speaking of that proper config piece, there are a couple items that we've seen leading to a majority of issues so let's take a look at those.Let's say you have a legacy web app, you know it requires IE, you go through the process of setting up your initial IE mode site list.You add that legacy site the list and it still doesn't work.First off, check the address bar to see if you're in IE mode to begin with.If you see the Internet Explorer e, the page is in IE mode.If not, something is likely wrong with either the overall IE mode configuration or the specific site list entry for that particular domain.Here, I've loaded up Microsoft Edge and gone ahead and reloaded bing.com in IE mode to demonstrate.You can see the Internet Explorer icon here in the address bar indicating that we are in fact in IE mode.If I go ahead and take us out of IE mode will drop back into the chromium engine.We see that the Internet Explorer e goes away.We're no longer in IE mode.That's a really quick spot check just to verify if you are or are not in IE mode to begin with.If you don't see the e, the first step then we want to take care of is to check to make sure that the overall IE mode setup is working as expected.The edge://compat page is your friend for that process.This is essentially the site list as far as your browser is concerned.This again is a great way to spot check or validate that the browser is getting the version of the site list that you think it's getting, that all of the entries are on the list and then it's pointed to the right file location, network location, etc.In my case, it's pretty easy to validate this as I only have one entry in the list, so it doesn't take very long to see that everything is on the up and up.For you, this may be a longer list, but this is just a way to at a glance to visualize that list and all that.This also has the file location where the site list XML file lives.So you can validate that the path and file name is correct as well.If everything is okay here, we can geta little bit deeper information by clicking over here to the Internet Explorer mode Diagnostics tab.Quite a bit of information here.There are a few main points that I like to focus on here for that at a glance quick validation type info.The first section here is the Enable Internet Explorer in Windows Features.Now if you disableInternet Explorer at Windows Feature level, IE mode will also stop functioning.The reason for that is that IE mode relies on the exact same back-end files that Internet Explorer 11 relies on so it needs to still be enabled at a Windows feature level.The browser makes that check here and displays the information here so you have it at a glance.We're just making sure that this says on.It does so we can move on down the list.Next is the Internet Explorer mode Settings section here, right here in this box.This maps to the group policy for Internet Explorer integration.This is essentially the toggle switch for IE mode as a feature.It's set to on, meaning that that group policy is configured and enabled and the option is set to Internet Explorer mode. That all checks out.It looks good to me and we can move on.The final section that I'd like to highlight here is this section for group policy settings.There are a few things that this maps to.The one that we care about the most is a group policy for the IE mode site list file.In this case, as I mentioned earlier, it's a local file on this local machine for testing purposes.In your case, this may be a web server or a network share, but this will have the path to the file that you specified by group policy.Additionally, if you're taking advantage of the enterprise mode Cloud site list management experience, you'll have some of that information down here below.I don't have that configured, so I don't have options here that reflect that, but that's where you would find it at a glance.If all of this checks out and it does for me, you can be pretty confident that your overall IE mode configuration is correct.You can also validate that by going to other sites that are on your IE mode site list to make sure that they're working.If we get past that overall IE mode configuration or if you do seethe e in the address bar for your legacy site, but the site is still broken or not functioning as you might expect, we can go on, move on to troubleshooting the specific entry in the site list.If I come back over here to the Enterprise mode site list page, again, this is the site list as far as the browser is concerned.I can right-click this and say open a new tab.This is going to take us to the raw XML file.Again for me, I only have one entry so this is not a very in-depth endeavor to validate.But for you there may be quite a bit more entries here.You can do things like control F and search for a particular URL to help you parse through the list more quickly, things like that.That can be very helpful. Things to pay attention to are spelling and syntax, typos, that thing. We're dealing with machines.You have to be very specific and careful with spelling and, periods, and slashes and that thing.This can be a way to check that.The other very important thing to take a look at is the compat mode setting.This is by far themost often misconfigured setting in IE mode.In my case, it's set to default.Let's click back over here to the Enterprise mode Sales Manager Tool.This is where you would build up your site list directly in the browser, and we can take a look at some of the different options for compat mode.This is where I go to click on Add a site.This is how you would add a new site to the site list.Click on the Compat mode drop-down here.This gives us a view of the different options available for compat mode.Default mode is the most common.That's what I had for that one entry in my site list.Default mode basically behaves as an out of the box IE11 experiencewithout any additional compatibility features.If your web apps or sites work in IE11 without any additional compat needed, that's it. That's the setting for you.Default will mimic that fresh IE11 experience.That being said, if your apps and sites are a little bit older, maybe they were designed for IE8 or even older than that, the Compat mode setting becomes increasingly important.Now, these options here fall under two main categories.These top three default mode, IE8 enterprise mode, and IE7 enterprise mode comprise what I like to refer to as the logic-based modes.They all use some internal logic based on things like the doc type declaration in the HTML page to determine which specific document mode to use for a given situation.They give you a little bit more flexibility.Something else to keep in mind is that they also respect things like X-UA compatible, meta tags, and headers.If your web page or web server is taking advantage of those, you need to make sure that you're in a logic-based mode so that you honor those directives.The other settings here down below what I call the strict document mode settings are just that.This setting will win over any X-UA compatible, for example.You don't want to use these if you have X-UA a compatible in play.What if you have no idea which compact mode you should be using for a particular page?How do we go about troubleshooting that?Well, what I would recommend is you go to where you last saw it working as you would expect in IE11.In IE11, we're going to take a look at the F12 developer toolbar.You can get there by either pushing the F12 key or by coming up here to the Tools menu.Here at the gear, and this F12 developer tools.It brings up this menu that I already have up here.We're paying particular attention to here to this document mode drop-down and the blue text below it, if there is any.There isn't always blue text below it, but when there is, it can be particularly important.I usually refer to this blue text as the why text.Why are we in this specific document that we're in.Again. It's not always there.You don't always have blue text, but when it is, we do generally want to pay attention to that.In this case, we're in IE11 document mode and the reason why is via X-UA compatible meta tag.In this case, the web page itself has a tag that is telling the browser I need to be loaded in IE11 doc mode, don't load me in anything else.Again, generally we want to take the web page or the web server's word for it.It generally knows best.We want to honor those directives whenever possible.That's why I strongly recommend and I keep harping on this be in one of those logic modes whenever possible.This over here is the documentation for the blue text.This describes the different option for that blue text there and the F12 developer toolbar.This top option is the F12 developer toolbar.This is really just used for testing.This if you manually use that drop-down in the F12 developer toolbar to change the doc mode.You're never going to see that out in the wild.You can safely ignore that.These next two options are the ones that I've been harping on for this last little bit here, Via-X-UA-compatible.Again, that's the web page or the web server telling the browser which document mode it needs to be loaded in and you generally want to take its word for it.Just one last time.If you see either of these two little blurbs here in that blue text, you absolutely want to make sure they're using one of the logic based modes, or it will ignore these things.Finally, these last three all fall under the same bucket.They're all related to an older compatibility feature from IE11 and Internet Explorer called Compatibility View or Compat View.I'm going to make this really simple.If you see any of these three blurbs in the blue text, you want to use IE7 Enterprise when you're setting up your IE mode site list for that page.IE7 Enterprise mimics the same behavior as compatibility view.If your site has one of these blurbs there, you just want to put it in the IE7 Enterprise and move on.Sorry. When you don't and you just have a number here in this box, I still recommend starting with a logic based mode to begin with if it will work.The reason for that is flexibility and minimizing the number of entries in your IE mode site list.What does that mean?If you use a logic based mode like default for a particular domain, you're passing over control to the browser to dish out different document modes for different pages within that domain.Page A requires IE11 doc mode.It can do that. It can give it that document mode based on logic.If another page within that same domain needs IE8 doc mode, for example and itspecifies that in an X-UA compatible tag, the browser will still give it IE8 doc mode.It has that flexibility and removes the necessity to specify individual site list entries for each individual page.Start with one ofthe logic based modes whenever you can get away with it.Only use those strict specific document mode entries if they're absolutely required, if the logic based modes fail for some reason.Shifting gears a bit.The other common issue we've seen in App Assure is a failing single sign on.This could be a case where you log into your site, but nothing happens, the page constantly reloads or prompts you to log in again.If there's single sign on in play and it works in IE11, it will usually boil down to neutral sites.Let's take a look at a demo.I'm going to open up Microsoft Edge and in private just to prevent some of this automatic profile stuff from happening.In this case, I'm going to be using the Outlook Web app as our stand-in legacy site.The Outlook Web app does not actually require IE mode, but I've forced it into our IE mode for this demonstration.Just keep that in mind.Here I can see it's in IE mode here.Again, this is our stand-in legacy site login process.If I were to go to sign in here, you can see that we're reloading very quickly and then it fails.This is a really common use case here, or a symptom, rather.If you're seeing that redirect, fail, or again, the other ways that it can manifest to you or the login just fails immediately or it prompts you for credentials like you never type them in to begin with, things like that,or a blank page after trying to log in, it can show up at a few different ways, but it generally boils down to the same thing.If you have single sign-on in play and worked in IE11, take a look at your neutral site setup.In my case, we very obviously have an issue here because we started in IE mode and we're no longer in IE mode.For an auth process to complete successfully, we need to stay within one engine.In this case, we want to stay in all IE mode.It would also be the same problem if we had a site that started in Microsoft Edge, natively dropped into IE mode and then dropped back out.We'd lose those credentials.We want to make sure that we configure our single sign-on pages correctly so that they can be used by all users.That's what neutral basically means.We're trying to say that all users, regardless of the engine, can take advantage of that single sign-on site.For me, again, it's pretty straightforward, it's pretty obvious what the missing neutral site is here.It's going to be login.live.com.But in some cases, it's not immediately obvious.Maybe that redirect happens very quickly and then dumps you back to an error screen or an error page on an entirely different domain or maybe on the domain you started at.Identifying that missing neutral site may be more difficult.In that case, we have a tool just for that purpose.It's called net export.If we go edge://net-exports, we can bring up the tool.In this case, I'm going to close my other tab here and prep my repro.I prep this by going to about:blank.This is just a blank HTML page that I'm going to use as a launchpad essentially to cut down on network noise.When collecting these network traces, they become very noisy very quickly.Whenever collecting them, I do always recommend closing all other browser instances and all other tabs.Because if you have a lot of that open, it really messes with the trace and makes it very difficult to read.They're already pretty difficult to read and very noisy, but you don't really want to do anything to make that problem worse than it already is.We'll go ahead and start this trace now by clicking start logging to disk.It's going to ask where I want to save that file.We've been doing this a little bit earlier, so I'll just go ahead and replace that earlier log.You just go ahead and save it wherever it's convenient for you, where you know where it's going to be.Now we know it'slogging because we get the red circle here on the top of the tab. We'll come over here.You want to leave that tab open and then go to your other tab to do your reproduction.We'll go ahead and go back to our demo site.Here we are back in IE mode.We can see that it's working.We'll go to sign in.In this case, it's using my cached credentials here.It's already attempting to log in.But we could see the same behavior.It said redirect, redirect, redirect and failure.That's fine. That's exactly what we would expect.We're going to come over here to the Net Export tab, click Stop Logging.Then you see this blue text here for the link to the netlog viewer.Click on that. This is the netlog viewer.Go ahead and click File, choose file, choose the file we just created, and click Open.We're going to click over here to the "Events" tab.We're going to drag this over a little bit to give us a little bit more of an easier time seeing the information.Then we just got to scroll down from top to bottom.The top is the oldest and it gets newer as you scroll down. First things first.You want to identify your starting URL.For me that's outlook.live.com.That's the place where we started.We're going to try and scroll down and identify a change in domain.Ideally, we're trying to identify any potential missing neutral sites.SSO log in type sites.Again, for me, I already know what the answer is, it's kind of cheating.But for you, I'm going to point out a few little tipsto use when you're trying to identify these sites.Things like favicons, images and icons.You can pretty safely ignore.It's not going to be directly related to the single sign on process.We're looking for other domains outside of that starter domain.This would be a potential one, this's ow2.This is just a short URL here.My personal tip isfor something that you're trying to find just visually is you're looking for usually a really long URL with a lot of query string information slapped onto the end of it.Also, look for some keywords like sign in, log in, auth, SSO,SSL, things like that, those tend to be red flags, that's your your single sign on site.In this case, we look at this long entry here.Grab this domain and then we're going to go ahead and add this entry to the site list here.Actually, I need to open up a not in private browser.Look over here and we'll go over here to edge://compat where we were earlier.We'll click over to the "Enterprise Site List Manager" tool in the browser.