Modern.IE

Suthish Nair
Feb 23, 2013
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Ah, at last after a long wait, a free tool from Microsoft that supports various versions of Internet Explorer.

Thanks for a small group of passionate engineers and technical evangelists to come up with this tool. Even

though it's in BETA version, we can still test our web sites. This free tool will be a big help

for testers, so that they can scan the web sites and make it a better one.

Recently one of the web sites we developed was compatible with IE7 and above. We were very confident

that the web site will work with IE7 and above also. We opened the web site in IE9 browser, everything looks fine,

but one of the web pages stoped working. After some investigation we found that the iframe is not compatible with

IE9. But, why is the iframe not loading under the IE9 browser? My team member (thanks to Basil John) has done a good

compatibility check of various browsers and determined that IE9 was the real cause of the problem here, not the iframe. Actually,

IE9 forces every iframe to use the same DocType provided by the container document. So here we need to force

the browser to use a docmode that tells the browser to recognize web standards. To find this issue we wasted almost

a week, searching each and every forum, used various tools like IETester, various add-ons etc. These types of different

problems can be easily determined using "modern.IE". modern.IE comes with a code detection wizard that takes care of

various coding problems that may result from supporting older versions of IE. This wizard scans your entire web site page or

HTML code and gives webpage results or a report. Let's do a scan.

We will scan www.c-sharpcorner .com to find common compatibility issues.

You can find modern.IE at http://www.modern.ie. Once the page is loaded, the URL will become:

http://www.modern.ie/en-US, because it's pointing to your preferred system language.

The Home Page looks as in the following:

Now click on "Scan a webpage" menu to scan your web site. Enter the web site and hit "Scan".

The scan result is as below:

The report shows the scan results in three categories.

1. Fix common problems from supporting old versions of IE.

2. Help this webpage work well across browsers and across devices.

3. Consider building with some new features in Windows 8.

Let's go through each category.

Fix common problems from supporting old versions of IE.

Common problems like DocType issue, jQuery, HTML 5 etc. will be listed under here. The report saying "We found something" under Frameworks and libraries, which says the framework or libraries that are used in the web page are not compatible with the latest versions of Internet Explorer.

Even the report suggests updating the libraries to the latest jQuery versions. Also, it helps with how to fix it.

Help this webpage work well across browsers, across devices.

This will help to identify the CSS issues, any browser plug-ins used for the web site, is the web site is responsive and various browser supports. Here you can start applying the emerging best practices on the web that are supported across various mobile, desktops, tablets etc. The report provides some "Suggested enhancement" to improve the web site.