Some users who have upgraded to Windows 8.1 are reporting that Google.com doesn’t render correctly in Internet Explorer 11. Other browsers work as expected, but Microsoft’s latest and greatest in both Modern UI and Desktop modes fails to load the search engine properly.
A thread titled “IE11 on Windows 8.1 – Google Search loads in legacy mode” over at the Google Groups forum has 13 posts at the time of writing. Many more complaints can be found on Twitter.
Here’s a screenshot of one user showing the problem:
One user on Google’s forum has found a solution. In IE11, click on Tools and choose Compatibility View Settings. Uncheck “Use Microsoft Compatibility lists” and Google’s search engine should work again.
Microsoft offers Compatibility View in IE8 and above to help newer versions of its browser load older websites that still expect previous versions of IE. The company maintains a list of websites that aren’t rendering properly in the new browser version, so that the browser can switch to compatibility view mode and load them correctly.
What appears to be happening here is that Google’s search engine has somehow landed on IE11′s Compatibility View list. Furthermore, IE11′s Compatibility View renders it incorrectly, even though older versions of IE all currently load Google properly. As a result, disabling this feature temporarily fixes the problem.
We say “temporarily” because this is not a permanent fix. IE11 shouldn’t need Compatibility view to load Google properly, and users of course should have to change any settings. What is surprising is that this problem did not occur in beta and preview releases of Windows 8.1 with IE11.
This is unfortunate as it means the millions of users who are upgrading to Windows 8.1 are getting a very poor experience with IE11. The browser may work fine on Bing and other websites, but chances are most users will head to Google at some point.
We have contacted Microsoft and Google about this issue. We will update this article if and when we hear back.
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