Every few weeks for the last six or so years, I see someone complain on Twitter or in forums that the entire Internet seems to think they’re running an old version of IE. For instance, an IE11 user on Windows 8.1 might see the following warning on Facebook:
These warnings typically occur when the browser is using Compatibility View mode for a site and the site demands a browser that supports modern standards. Many customers used to find themselves accidentally in this state because they were overzealously clicking the “Compatibility View” button (back when IE had one) or clicking the “Display all sites in Compatibility View” checkbox (back when IE had it).
Since IE11 has cleaned that mess up (by hiding Compatibility View), you might wonder how a user could end up in such a broken state.
The answer is both complicated and interesting, deeply intertwined with nearly 15 years of subtle Internet Explorer behaviors.
When I ask the affected IE11 user to visit my User-Agent string test page, they see IE7’s Compatibility View user-agent string:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; Trident/7.0; .NET4.0E; .NET4.0C; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.30729)
But why?
Since IE no longer shows the Zone in the status bar, you must right-click the page and choose Properties to get your next clue:
Wait, what?!? Why is some random site on the Internet in the privileged Local Intranet security zone?
Next the user does the same test on Facebook.com and finds that it too is in the Intranet Zone. In fact, the whole web is getting zoned as Intranet!
This represents a significant security hole, and the user has only discovered it because, by default, Tools > Compatibility View Settings has Display Intranet sites in Compatibility View set, and the unwanted CompatView causes sites like Facebook to complain.
So what’s going on here!?!
Click Tools > Internet Options > Connections > LAN Settings, and observe that the settings are the defaults:
Wait… what exactly does that Automatically detect settings option do?
Why, it allows a computer on your network to decide what proxy server your client should use through a process called WPAD. The server in question gets to supply a proxy configuration script that implements a function FindProxyForUrl(). That function returns either a proxy (e.g. “PROXY myproxy:8080” or “DIRECT” to indicate that the request should be sent directly to the origin server and bypass the proxy.
And now we’re getting somewhere. Take a look at the checkboxes inside Tools > Internet Options > Security > Local Intranet > Custom Level, specifically the second checkbox:
Yup, that’s right—if a proxy script returns DIRECT for a given site, IE defaults to treating that site as a part of the Local Intranet Zone, giving it additional privileges and also defaulting it to CompatView. Oops.
You might think: “well, surely a network proxy administrator would never make that mistake!”
Back in 2011, the IE team started getting email from all over the company complaining that “IE is broken. It doesn’t support HTML5!” Guess why not? Oops.
Recommendations
Unless you’re running IE on a Corporate Network that requires support for things like Negotiate Authentication and the like, you should untick the Automatically detect intranet network checkbox and all of the checkboxes beneath it. This improves security and enhances IE’s sandbox.
Unless you’re running a laptop that moves to corporate networks, you should also disable the Automatically detect settings checkbox to prevent IE from asking your network what proxy to use.
-Eric Lawrence
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That’s such a screwy thing that IE11 would show as IE7 because of bad network settings. I’m most impressed that you figured that out, can articulate it so well, and are helping people who come to you out of the blue — like me.
Well, Eric did had its fair share in the development of IE so it’s expected of him to know what causes this behavior :)