IE11 on Windows Phone 8.1

  • Article

There are several differences between Internet Explorer 11 on Windows Phone 8.1 and on the Windows 8.1 desktop. See Web development for Windows Phone for a list of IE differences between phone and desktop across previous versions. See Diagnosing Mobile Website Issues on Windows Phone 8.1 with Visual Studio for more on debugging your site with a Windows Phone emulator or physical device.

Internet Explorer for Windows Phone 8.1 Update

To improve compatibility with existing sites on the mobile web, the following features have been introduced or changed with the Internet Explorer for Windows Phone 8.1 Update. These additions and changes are not currently included in IE11 for the desktop.

Additional features

CSS

HTML5

Other

Changed features

CSS

HTML / HTML5

  • button and label elements: Now independently clickable when nested inside an a element link (non-standard behavior).
  • Focus model: html and body elements are no longer eligible for focus by default (must have tabindex or be contenteditable to be focusable).
  • Media elements: autoplay attribute is ignored and play method is only supported if initiated by user action.
  • meta element:
    • The url= token of the content attribute is now optional for http-equiv="refresh" redirection (non-standard behavior).
    • Support for dynamically updating the (non-standard) viewport meta tag.
  • MIME type handling: "application/x-javascript" is now treated and rendered as "text/plain" (non-standard behavior).

Other

  • Event model: Added support for dispatchEvent on elements not attached to the DOM.
  • Screen Orientation API: Added (non-standard) support for window.orientation (same behavior as window.screen.msOrientation).
  • User agent string updated
  • Downloads: Windows Phone 8.1 introduced the ability for users to download media files in addition to directly playing them from a URL. Internet Explorer for Windows Phone 8.1 Update introduces a way to eliminate the download feature if you do not want users to directly download particular media files. To do this, set the flag OpenOnlyLink to true in the GET header and we will only allow the media (or other file) to be played directly.

Additional features on Windows Phone 8.1

The following features introduced in earlier versions of Windows Phone continue to be supported in IE11 on Windows Phone 8.1, but are not supported in IE11 for the desktop.

Unsupported features on Windows Phone 8.1

The contents of the IE11 Developer Guide apply to IE11 on Windows Phone 8.1, except for the following features:

Additionally, these features introduced in earlier versions of Internet Explorer for the desktop are not supported on Windows Phone 8.1:

User-agent string changes for IE11