Bug with IE11 on seminary.lds.org

[ETedj]

I am a member of the Internet Explorer engineering team. We have been getting reports that seminary.lds.org does not work on IE11. Going to the page presents you with a "Your browser version is incompatible with this website" and then it proceeds to give you options to download Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Opera (Safari and Opera?? Seriously? IE11 is a much better choice )

This is also a problem because many of the new WindowsRT devices do not support any other browser (such as the Surface 2)

Anyway, I thought I would dig into the issue. Looking at the source code it appears the page incorrectly assumes IE11 is IE7.

In bowser.js (line 37) there is the following UserAgent detection logic:

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if (ie) return {
        msie: t
      , version: (function(ua) {
          if (ua.match(/Trident\/(\d+(\.\d+)?)/i)) {
            switch (ua.match(/Trident\/(\d+(\.\d+)?)/i)[1]) {
              case '6.0':
                return '10.0';
              case '5.0':
                return '9.0';
              case '4.0':
                return '8.0';
              default:
                return '7.0';
            }
          }
          else {
            return '7.0';
          }
      })(ua)
      , compatability: ua.indexOf("MSIE 7.0") > -1
    };

Unfortunately IE11 has the Trident token "Trident 7.0". Because there is no

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case '7.0' return '11.0'

, the page defaults to

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return '7.0'

(IE7)

The Internet Explorer Outreach team has contacted the Church three times to try to get this fixed but has never gotten a response. What is the proper channel for contacting about problems like this? (Is tech.lds.org the best way?)

I hope this helps get the problem fixed. Feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions (or if there are any blocking issues in IE that you would like to get fixed )

Thanks for everything you guys do!

[aebrown]

The Internet Explorer Outreach team has contacted the Church three times to try to get this fixed but has never gotten a response. What is the proper channel for contacting about problems like this? (Is tech.lds.org the best way?)

Although I don't know a good answer to your general question about proper channels, I've forwarded this particular report to someone that I believe can make sure that the problem gets fixed.

Thank you for taking the time to report this problem, and for giving such excellent details about exactly what is going on.

[rsbohn]

Update to the latest bowser.js would most likely fix this. Also, I can't run Safari (no Mac) and won't run Opera.

[ETedj]

Just following up on this issue. We got another report that this is still broken in IE11 (Which is the second most used desktop browser world-wide).

Just tested replacing the code with the latest version of bowser.js (https://github.com/ded/bowser), and it looks like this fixes the issue.

What I would actually suggest is to do away with Javascript UserAgent sniffing all together, as it is historically unreliable.

If you really want to redirect all IE7 (and lower) users to a Unsupported Browser page, do so using Conditional comments

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<!--[if lt IE 8]>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://seminary.lds.org/unsupportedBrowser">
<![endif]-->

Let me know if there is anything else I can do to help out.

And tell the seminary.lds.org team Thanks for looking into this issue. (And sorry to bother you guys if the fix is already in the pipeline)