Switch webpage from IE Metro to IE10 Desktop Version - windows-8

I need to create a way so that when users load our webpage inside IEmetro it switches them to IE10 Desktop automatically. Reason behind this is our website features won't work in IEmetro. our site is built in Aspx and cs code, java script and uses some jquery at times.
Does anyone have an idea how we can achieve this?

You don't have any control over what browser the user is using; and there is no reason why your site should not work in Internet Explorer in the Modern UI (formerly 'Metro'). The two browsers are nearly identical in just about every way.
If you're having problems working with Internet Explorer 10, please ask a more specific question here and/or work through the Internet Explorer 10 Guide for Developers.

I would also be interested in this.
IEMetro unfortunately has a number of features disabled, and shows javascript alerts differently drastically altering the user experience.

Related

How do some sites automatically open in Edge when tried to open in IE11?

When I try to browse to netflix.com (for example) in IE11 (on Windows 10), IE11 shows a page with the title "We recommend viewing this website in Microsoft Edge", and the site automatically gets opened in Edge.
Does anyone know how that works? Is it done via an internally compiled list of sites or something I can set up on my website?
Thanks
You had asked, "Does anyone know how that works? Is it done via an internally compiled list of sites or something I can set up on my website?"
When a user goes to a site that is incompatible with Internet Explorer, they will be automatically redirected to Microsoft Edge. For more detailed information, you can refer to the Redirection from Internet Explorer to Microsoft Edge for compatibility with modern web sites.
Microsoft maintains a list of all sites that are known to be incompatible with Internet Explorer. You can view the site list here. If you want to add your site to the incompatible site list then you can refer to the Request an update to the IE compatibility list.
The MS Edge 87 or greater browser installs the BHO named IEToEdgeBHO that performs the redirection based on IE compatibility list from IE to Edge browser.
You can find this BHO at the location below on your machine.
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\<Your_browser_version>\BHO
If you want to achieve something similar using the code in your own site then you can refer to the example on this answer. The test shows results for the Edge legacy browser but it can also work with the Edge (Chromium) browser.
Note: that the example code mentioned in the answer may break when the Edge browser is not installed on the machine. so you can try to modify the example to handle that kind of situation.
Helpful reference:
What “magic” causes “cnn.com” when typed in IE11 to automatically launch Edge (Chromium)?
Netflix specifically is on a list of websites that automatically open in Edge when they are accessed from Internet Explorer. The list is maintained by Microsoft.
If you do not want to go through the application process to get your website added to this list, you can resort to detecting which browser the user is on and handling the notice yourself.
Here is a decent list of current Internet Explorer user agents.

Does Microsoft UI Automation Framework work with Chrome, Python and Java Apps?

I am working on an automation project, in which I need to capture the activities [ application launched, data entered, input type etc.] user performs on a desktop. I came across Microsoft UI Automation framework which so far works well for native windows based applications like MS Office, .NET apps etc. However I did not find any useful information / samples of capturing the information from different web browsers [Chrome is a must], Python apps, Java Apps etc. Can someone please confirm whether MS UI Automation Framework supports such apps. Any working example to extract user activities from these apps would be highly appreciated. Thanks.
Chrome only supports UI Automation for toolbars, tabs, menu, buttons around the web page. Everything that's rendered as a web page is not seen by UIA.
For the web page content, the easiest way is to use Selenium (driven by the ChromeDriver), which is kind of a de facto standard for browsers, and has nothing to do with UIA.
To test if an app supports UIA, and how far it does, it's very easy, just run UIA's Inspect tool and check the UI tree over that application.
Some additions to Simon's answer...
Chrome page content can be seen by UIA if you run chrome --force-renderer-accessibility. Only for existing Chrome process it won't work. Though user can create a new tab chrome://accessibility manually and enable UIA for all or some chosen pages. This method also works for AT-SPI accessibility technology on Linux. Of course, Selenium WebDriver is an industry standard here. But another way exists. Both Mozilla and IE support UIA by default.
Inspect.exe can be simply downloaded from this GitHub repo.
Regarding Java apps it depends on the app type. Your chances is about 50/50.
WxPython or PyQt5 are good for UIA. TkInter or Kivy apps are not.
P.S. There is an example how to drag a file from explorer.exe and drop to Google Drive in Chrome using Python library pywinauto.
I'm a bit late to the party..
But Chromes accessibility features are only activated once something tries to access it's accessibility.
If you call AccessibleObjectFromWindow ([DllImport("oleacc.dll")]) with the window handle an existing chrome window will have its accessibility activated (and you'll see the actual web page content in UIA!).
If the chrome window is opened after your app is running - Chrome pings open processes for any open accessibility apps... for that you use AccessibleObjectFromEvent and the event you're responding to comes from the windows pipeline: EVENT_SYSTEM_ALERT = 0x0002 .
The bottom line is - you have to tell chrome that there's something installed that wants to access it's web page content.
Oh! and your application has to be signed!! Unsigned apps won't be able to access web content - I think that's the same in firefox too.
I hope this helps someone in the future.
See:
https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/accessibility

Create/embed Firefox/Chrome base browser in Visual Studio

Im creating a freeware application (long live the free community) and I'm trying to add various features that might drive people to use the application such as implementing whatsapp web https://web.whatsapp.com/ into the app so that the user will always have an "always on top" window with their chats rather than everytime having to switch tabs if they're multitasking on their browser.
The problem i am having is that the built in Browser control with VS 2013 does not work with whatsapp web and i get the option to use supported browsers like firefox...chrome...safari.
Is there anyway to make a VB.NET application open an actual chrome/firefox based browser within itself?
I found an article on Gecko Browser...I am not sure if web.whatsapp.com would see this as a firefox browser: http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?692005-Mozilla-Firefox-Gecko-Xulrunner-in-VB-NET-%28versions-14-and-up%29
Help appreciated.

IE 11 - Is there a way to check then enable / disable enterprise mode?

I am out of wit as how to solve this problem in Javascript or HTML. I have customers currently using web applications built for ie9 and under. These legacy applications do not work well on IE11. IT solutions was to enable enterprises mode. Enterprises mode was designed to avoid "common compatibility problems associated with web apps written and tested on older versions of Internet Explorer".
See: http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/43972-ie11-enterprise-mode-enable-disable-users.html
Enabling enterprises mode appear to be problematic on web application written using Bootstrap and AngularJS. Ie, responsive does not work at all unless enterprises mode is disabled. Not just AngularJS and Bootstrap but other libraries as well.
The solution that I am looking for is a way to check the status of enterprises mode via javascript, then tell the users to either enable / disable the mode. Better, if it can be turn off / on automatically via JS or HTML attributes.
Snooping in the document.x and window.x objects, I do not see any properties that we would give me an indication that enterprises mode is enable. Any suggestion?
Repro(s):
IE11 > Developer Tool > Console > Type window
IE11 > Developer Tool > Console > Type document
There is no DOM property that indicates that you're running EMIE. The whole idea of EMIE is to emulate IE8 behavior better than the IE8 document mode emulates IE8 behavior. EMIE should only be used in specific cases where it's needed; it should not be used wholesale.
It is possible to detect EMIE in certain cases. If you look carefully at the list of user-agent strings over the last couple of releases, there's a noticeable difference between EMIE on IE11 and the user agent string for IE11 RTM.
However, before you take that as your magic bullet, there are two caveats:
You cannot disable EMIE programmatically. It's a local configuration change only.
The user agent for IE11 is completely different today than it was when IE11 was released. Based on reports from the IE team, the UA string is going to be even more complicated, especially once "IE Spartan" (or whatever they choose to call it") hits the wire.
My recommendation? Create a small launcher page that does a simple feature detection for the web app in question. If you detect features consistent with what's needed for the app, then display a link to launch the app. If feature detection fails to detect IE8, IE11, or whatever version you've targeted, display a warning with a link to more troubleshooting information. Be sure to include a launch link anyway, just in case.
This way, the user has the information they need and you have a lightweight way of handling the issue, one that doesn't require too many updates to the app in question.
Hope this helps...
-- Lance
To my mind the reason of the issue is that IE 11 Enterprise mode emulates IE 8. But bootstrap doesn't support IE 8. To overcome it just use HTML5 shim and Respond.js as described here.
<script src="js/respond.min.js"></script>
<script src="js/html5shiv.min.js"></script>
But without check like <!--[if lt IE 9]> - because it seems that it doesn't work in the enterprise mode.
The better solution would be not just include the mentioned scripts without conditions but find out the appropriate condition instead of < IE 9.
To fix the problem with angularjs just use the following meta tag:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1">
For those who also struggled with this problem. I have submitted a feature request to MS IE Team.
See:
https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/details/1159543/need-a-way-for-client-side-codes-to-detect-enterprises-mode
My solution is a workaround that involve checking the width of the container div. Enterprises mode do not support responsive.

Can I change the rendering engine of the WebBrowser control to an older version?

i have an application with a webbrowsercontrol. this webbrowsercontrol is going to load a page that is not compatible with IE9. (cannot change this because its produced by somebody else) By default VB.NET 2010's webbrowser control uses IE9 renderengine, and can run in some sort of compatibility mode. unfortunately even in compatibility mode the page do not work. is there are way to use a webbrowser control with a genuine IE7 or IE8 render engine? thanks
UPDATE
explaining the problem: i have a page with a JAVA applet inside. this java applet has a popup opening with a textbox. this textbox is forced to stay in front until closed. this works fine in IE7 and IE8. in IE9 however if i move the browser window or access any other application this messagebox jumps to the back. and cant be clicked anymore. my webbrowser (IE9 running any emulation) does not work. it beheaves as if it still would be on IE9 even if i emulate IE7 or IE8.
is there are way to use a webbrowser control with a genuine IE7 or IE8 render engine?
Yes, but it requires that you downgrade the version of Internet Explorer that is installed on the computer to version 7 or 8, which doesn't make for a friendly installation experience.
The issue is that the WebBrowser control always uses the version of IE that is installed on the computer because it simply delegates rendering to the native library shdocvw.dll, the same one that is used by IE itself. In your case, that appears to be IE 9. However, by default, it also runs in IE 7 compatibility mode. You can change this by editing the registry, but you cannot change the version of the rendering engine.
And unfortunately, this means you're out of luck, because running multiple versions of IE on a single computer is not and has never been a supported configuration. It can be accomplished for testing purposes, but it requires additional software and the versions don't play nicely together. Certainly not nicely enough for one to support the standalone IE browser while the other drives the .NET WebBrowser control.
Fixing the code to work properly with IE 9 is the best option. IE 9 represents Microsoft's slow progression towards a standards-compliant browser, and although it still has some quirks, it is worth supporting. I know you said that the website code is maintained by "someone else", but I recommend filing a support request with them—their code is buggy and needs to be fixed. If you (or they) need help with this, they can ask some of our code ninjas web standards experts here on Stack Overflow.
Alternatively, you could explore replacing the WebBrowser control with an alternative control. There are several good ones for the .NET Framework, wrapping the rendering engines used by other popular browsers. For example:
WebKit .NET is a wrapper for the WebKit engine, used by Google Chrome and Apple Safari.
GeckoFX is a wrapper for the Gecko rendering engine, used by Mozilla Firefox.
MozNet is an alternative wrapper for Gecko.
Unfortunately, if the code you're dealing with is so badly written that IE 9's feeble attempt at standards-compliance brings it to its knees, it's unlikely that switching to the rendering engine for another even more standards-compliant browser will bring much success.