Error in Rendering Angular on Internet Explorer 11
2 min read

Error in Rendering Angular on Internet Explorer 11

Error in Rendering Angular on Internet Explorer 11

I have an app developed with Angular. For the past weeks I had an issue that some users would get the page load as plain text:

behaviour

The end-of-life for IE11 is supposed to be in 2020 for normal windows machines. However, IE11 will live a bit longer on Windows Server machines apparently. Consequently, we have to invest some time in trying to fix this...

Initially, I thought the server was sending text/plain encoding, but the page was sent properly.

I started then looking online for a solution and the standard answer was that the app was missing some polyfills.

Final assessment was that we can ask users to switch to a more modern browser (e.g. Firefox).

Unortunately, not all users will make the change, so I've decided to look a bit more. I found out that some sites (e.g. intranet) were rendered using something called compatibility view. Once you disable it, you get the angular app rendered properly!

Steps are:

  1. Locate the 'Compatibility view settings' in Internet Explorer's menu

    menu

  2. Disable the compatibility view for the relevant site (intranet in my case):

    settings

  3. Reload the page

Now, the angular app should be visible. if it's not, then you need to dig more.

Note: Other apps may have issues rendereing if you disable compatibility view.

HTH,