Compatibility with Internet Explorer 11

Microsoft Internet Explorer

QUESTION

Will ToolBook generated DHTML lessons properly function within version 11 of Internet Explorer?

DETAILS

There are two problems to be aware of:

WINDOWS 10 CREATORS UPDATE / MISSING OBJECTS
On April 11, 2017, Microsoft released the Creators Update for Windows 10, which will slowly roll out to all Windows 10 users. This update includes changes to Internet Explorer 11. Unfortunately, these changes to Internet Explorer 11 will cause various objects in your ToolBook lessons to not display, and appear to be missing. The rest of this article is not relevant to this particular problem, but more details about this problem can be found here.

INITIAL RELEASE OF INTERNET EXPLORER 11
Problems have been encountered across the computer industry with the release of version 11 of Internet Explorer. The primary issue is that Internet Explorer 11 pretends to be Firefox....and no longer programmatically identifies itself internally as Internet Explorer. This is an intentional change from Microsoft - to be more 'standards' compliant. Unfortunately complex web pages (like those generated by ToolBook) are very dependent on browsers properly identifying themselves. This failure of Internet Explorer 11 to identify itself as Internet Explorer may cause issues with your lessons properly loading into Internet Explorer 11. The remainder of this article will explain how to address this problem.

SYMPTOMS

There are a variety of symptoms which can be experienced in this situation, including:

Unsupported Browser Warning

Internet Explorer 11 users may see a warning indicating that they are using an Unsupported Browser, even though they'll see Internet Explorer 7+ in the list of suggested alternate browsers.

Page P1 Does Not Exit

When trying to view the lesson, Internet Explorer displays this error message on top of the Please Wait Loading screen: Page p1 does not exist and could not be loaded.

Match Item Questions

The inability to draw lines between match items. You'll see that it is trying to draw the arrowed lines, but unsuccessfully.

Media Playback

The playback of media in Internet Explorer is handled differently than in other browsers. As such Internet Explorer 11 may fail to play media while the browser is pretending to be Firefox.

QUICK WORKAROUND THAT AN END-USER CAN TRY

Our recommendations for quick workarounds that your end-users can try:

Use a different Web Browser

Have your users utilize a different web browser (an older version of Internet Explorer, or another supported web browser such as Firefox or Chrome).

Compatibility View Settings

Microsoft included a feature within Internet Explorer 11 to provide a way for the user of the browser to ask a web site to render the web page as if it were Internet Explorer 7. This is accomplished by clicking on the GEAR icon in the upper right corner of Internet Explorer 11 and choosing the option "Compatibility View Settings". Once the settings window opens, click the ADD button to add the current Domain (Web Site) to the list of sites to run in Compatibility mode. This will allow ToolBook to properly detect the Internet Explorer 11 web browser, allowing your content to load properly in Internet Explorer 11.

SOLUTION

The actual permanent solution to this problem involves changing the JavaScript logic that ToolBook uses to check to see if the browser being used is Internet Explorer 11.

Option 1: Patching ToolBook

This issue is resolved in a Patch for ToolBook 11.5. Once the patch is applied to your ToolBook 11.5 installation, republish your ToolBook 11.5 lessons to DHTML format to ensure that your newly published DHTML content will work properly with Internet Explorer 11. A patch is not available for versions of ToolBook earlier than 11.5.

Option 2: Manually Fix Already Published Lessons

For those of you who are using ToolBook 11.5 but cannot republish the content (perhaps because it is already on a Web Server) - there is a way to manually adjust this logic within each of the already published lesson, to fix the problem. Essentially a small adjustment to some JavaScript logic will allow ToolBook's DHTML to work with Internet Explorer 11.

LOCATING THE JAVASCRIPT LOGIC

The file which controls the detection of Internet Explorer 11 is named BOOTSTRAP.JS and can be found within each of your web-published project folders. For example, here's a view of a sample web export where I selected Firefox and Internet Explorer as my desired supported browsers:

FOLDER: firefox3

FOLDER: ie7

FOLDER: media

FOLDER: resources

FOLDER: unsupported

bootstrap.jar

BOOTSTRAP.JS <--------

buildid.ser

index.html

media.ser

readme.html

scriptlet.html

The file BOOTSTRAP.JS is dynamically created during the web publishing process and is custom-made for your current project. It includes all the necessary JavaScript to handle the Browser Detection logic. This also means that the contents of BOOTSTRAP.JS can be (and is very likely to be) different from project to project.

EDIT THE BOOTSTRAP.JS FILE

The BOOTSTRAP.JS file is just a text file - so it is recommended that you use NOTEPAD to edit it.

Within the BOOTSTRAP.JS file, locate the one occurrence of:

="ie7";

directly after that, you will find a JavaScript function (shown below in Blue) such as:

="ie7";_Ke[_Ke.length]=function(){

Very carefully ADD the following code (shown in Orange), directly after the function declaration (feel free to copy/paste from this article):

="ie7";_Ke[_Ke.length]=function(){if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Trident/")>-1){return true;}

Save the file, and exit Notepad.

That's it, you will now be able to properly load that edited lesson in Internet Explorer 11.

Warning

You may need to close and reopen Internet Explorer (and possibly clear your Browser Cache) in order for Internet Explorer to recognize the changes to this file.