Problem with Intranet Web Site Content?

Did your Intranet web application users complain about your website not working at all? Here is one of the root cause: IE running in emulation mode of older browsers. It will mess up some JavaScript functions that relies on relative new features.

Symptoms

• Your clients use IE
• Only have problem when using Intranet like URLs
• JavaScript console shows weried error messages like: 'JSON' is undefined
• IE 11 Emulation (or IE10 document mode) is showing IE 7 or older or even quirk mode (however, if you see Edge then the solution I provide below won't help you)
• DOM view showing your nice HTML5 doc type being commented out

IE commented out doctype

Root Cause

IE option "Display intranet sites in Compatibility View" forced it to emulate behavior of older browser for Intranet web applications, regardless what is in the web page's header.

Solution

This worked for me: change IIS HTTP header

• In IIS admin, go to the folder or file that you want to enable IE "Edge" mode
• Click "HTTP Response Headers"
• Click "Add", and type Name: X-UA-Compatible, Value: IE=edge

HTTP Header that will fix the problem

Remeber to Reset IE Zoom (Selenium Web Driver + JUnit + ExtJS)

If you are unlucky as me, you may be doing research of this error message right now:

org.openqa.selenium.remote.SessionNotFoundException: Unexpected error launching Internet Explorer. Browser zoom level was set to 125%. It should be set to 100% (WARNING: The server did not provide any stacktrace information)

Everything was working perfectly, and all tests passed with green color. Then all of a sudden all test cases failed with the error above. It's very a clear error message, and you don't need any research to fix the problem. Just open IE and visit the website under test, then set zoom level to 100%. Then all tests should pass again (of course, only if they were passing before).

However, I do not want to ensure zoom level before every test runs, so I found the following code snippet to ask Selenium WebDriver to ignore IE zoom level:
Things were quiet for a while until I was hit by a strange error message about object not clickable. Of course, when I put it in context, you knew I should check for zoom level immediately. However, in real life, it threw me a big loop, and I spent a good hour researching how to click ExtJS component or related catches that I may not know before. Until, I accidentally saw the zoom level is not 100%. Now after I reset zoom level back to 100%, problem is gone. I imagine WebDriver has some coordinate conversion issue when IE's zoom level is 100%.

So what is the conclusion? Two bullet points for IE testing:

• Do NOT use the code snippet above to ignore zoom level
• Always ensure zoom level is 100%

Adobe Flex RSL Error in IE

This is another case which I know the cause and the solution for a problem. But I don't understand why it would cause a problem.

Environment:
  - IE10, Win7, Flash Player 11.8 debugger
  - Google Chrome  28.0 with Flash Player 11.8

Symptom:
  Flex application stopped  working in IE. Always getting this error message: "RSL Error 1 of 2". RSL is short for Runtime Shared Library. Using ServiceCapture, I do see the main SWF loaded, and the first RSL loaded, but no the rest.
  The same Flex application works perfectly in Google Chrome.

Cause:
  In the the IE Security setting, "Enable Protected Mode" is unchecked.


Solution:
  Go to IE > Tools > Internet Options > Security, make sure "Enable Protected Mode" is checked. Then restart IE. Voila, it all works again. In retrospect, I might turned it off when I was trying to set up Selenium test framework.

Question:
  It's still beyond me why "Protected Mode" seems to make IE 10 more compatible. Just a few days back I had another problem with Office Web application due to the exact same cause. An extra IE windows will always popup when I open an Office 2013 application in Excel. The problem is gone after I enabled protected mode.

----
Flex: a RIA web application development framework based on Adobe Flash technology

Error Installing ActiveX in IE

If an ActiveX component fails to install in IE, to find out the source of the problem, you just need to select IE menu: Tools > Internet Options, click "Settings" button in the "Browsing history" group, then click the "View files" button. There should be a file named like this: "?CodeDownloadErrorLog!name={XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX}". This is the error log that contains a bit more information to help find the source of installation failure. The above description is based on IE 7, you should be able to find similar options in other IE versions.

In my specific case, the error log looks like this:

*** Code Download Log entry (07 Nov 2007 @ 10:01:26) ***
Code Download Error: (hr = 800c0300) Unknown Error!!
Operation failed. Detailed Information:
...

...
LOG: Item mfc42.dll being processed.
ERR: INF Processing:  Failed (800c0300) processing: mfc42.dll
. Cannot get primary/default language!LOG: URL Download Complete: hrStatus:0, hrOSB:800c0300, hrResponseHdr:0, URL:(*****.CAB)
LOG: Reporting Code Download Completion: (hr:800c0300 (FAILED), CLASSID: e45975a1..., szCODE:(*****.cab), MainType:(null), MainExt:(null))

Below is the related section in the .inf file:

 [mfc42.dll]
 FileVersion=6,2,4131,0
 file=http://[Web Server]/libraries.cab
 RegisterServer=no
 DestDir=11

After I commented out the "FileVersion" parameter, the ActiveX component is installed successfully.

 [mfc42.dll]
 ;FileVersion=6,2,4131,0
 file=http://[Web Server]/libraries.cab
 RegisterServer=no
 DestDir=11

Since the problem only happens on Windows 2000 computers, and my development environment in Windows XP Pro. I suspect that the MFC42 library provided by me may not be compatible with Win2000. Or the MFC42 is already in use by Win2000, and Win2000 have difficulty upgrading to the newer version provided by me.

View Generated Source in IE

I have "Web Developer" add-on for Firefox installed for a while. I love the "View Generated Source" function. Recently, I discovered an excellent way to add this functionality to IE by Favelet or Bookmarklet. This approach is inspired by the reference links below. I tried 2 variations of the Favelet, and end up using the first one.

javascript:void(window.open("javascript:'<xmp>' +
opener.window.document.documentElement.outerHTML + '</xmp>'"));
Good: HTML source is shown in new window.
Bad: Only works for pages served from localhost, due to IE's policy against cross domain access. However, this is not a concern for me, because the main reason I want to see "generated source" is for web development on local computer.

javascript:document.write("<xmp>"+document.documentElement.innerHTML+
"</xmp>");

To make this function easily accessible, I added it to IE bookmark "Link" folder (see screenshot below). Now, I can see the generated source (including generated HTML and Javascript) with just one click on the link named "source".



Related Links:
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/tutorials/aspnet/a4a16033-9811-45dc-8c6b-15d093c0c3ea/javascript-debugging-tool.aspx
http://ajaxian.com/archives/ie-tip-cheeky-way-to-see-the-current-state-of-the-page#comment-3928