Troubleshooting Internet Explorer

If there’s one thing that’s always important to keep in mind when developing Web-based applications, then it’s the settings of the browsers running the applications.

For example, Internet Explorer through its many iterations has come with a large number of quirks and settings options that vary by browser version. The number of configuration options in IE has increased significantly in version 9, which gives more control to users but mostly ends up causing confusion and support calls.

I myself find the options somewhat confusing so I intend to write a series of articles in an effort to clear the basics up.

This article in particular will cover problems and ways of dealing with IE add-ons.

Read this First

Before starting to troubleshoot IE, I suggest skimming the Internet Explorer Microsoft support knowledge-base for relevant information.

More specifically, Microsoft offers a well written debugging article for Internet Explorer that goes in detail through steps for users to take in solving problems with IE. I found this article useful since sometimes when browsing to a Web application, users can’t even see the main page and just see an error saying “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage”.

Although the article is specific to a single problem, the troubleshooting steps are almost universally applicable with some interesting hints as well.

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