If you came to this page, because of a warning message that appeared on your site customization tool, it means that if your site users are using IE11, they will experience limited features of ShortPoint.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Prerequisites
• Before we begin
• Issue
• Solution
  • Step 1: Download master page file
  • Step 2: Update the master page code
  • Step 3: Upload master page file
• Important: Enterprise Mode is On

Prerequisites

Editing master page is required for this article. The following features are required to edit the master page of the site and site collection:

1. Navigate to Settings > Site Settings of the Parent Site.
2. Under Site Collection Administration, click the Site collection features link.
3. Enable the SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature by clicking the Activate button.
4. Navigate to Settings > Site Settings of your Site. 
5. Under Site Settings click the Manage site features link. 
6. Enable the SharePoint Server Publishing site features, click the Activate button.

Before we begin

• This article requires a basic knowledge of the HTML language, and how to edit HTML pages.
• Before editing your master page file, you need to know which master page is applied to your site. To check this, go to Site Settings > Site Master Page Settings, and see the value of the drop-down menu as shown in the next figure:
  
  

Note: In case of having the "Inherit site master page from parent of this site" option, you need to go to parent site's Site Settings > Site Master Page Settings.

Issue

Your SharePoint master page contains a piece of code (a <meta> tag), that forces IE browser (not Edge) to use IE9 document mode (to behave like IE9), even if the site user is using the most recent and updated IE11 browser.

This means that the users won't see any animations, and they will have a sluggish user experience.

Solution

You simply need to update your SharePoint's master page to target the latest version of IE, to update your master page, follow these simple steps.

Step 1: Download master page file

Go to the Site Settings:

Then, open the Master pages and page layouts:

Find the HTML version of your master page:

• If you are using Seattle as a master page for the site, look for seattle.html file. 
• If you are using Oslo as a master page, then look for oslo.html file. 

For the purpose of this article we will demonstrate updating a seattle master page.

Important: You need to download the .html file of your master page, not the .master file. If you're doing your updates on the .master file, all of your changes will be lost soon, since the .master file will be auto-generated by SharePoint from the .html file.

Note: If you don't know what is your master page, get back to the Before we begin section above, and it will tell you how to find it out.

1. Select your master page HTML file.
2. Click Check Out.
3. And Download a Copy, as shown below:

Step 2: Update the master page code

Open the downloaded file into a text editor of your choice, and look for the following <meta> tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=9" />

Update the value of the content attribute to "IE=edge":

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />

Note: The <meta> tag might be placed multiple times in your master page file. Make sure to update them all.

Now, Save the file.

Step 3: Upload master page file

From the Master pages and page layouts, open the ribbon bar, and click Upload Document button:

Click Choose File (1) and select the file that you have just edited. Then, click OK (2) to upload it:

Another dialog will appear asking you to enter some information about the master page. Don't type anything, just click the Check In button:

One last step you need to do is to make your changes available to all of your site visitors, which is to publish this master page. To do that, select your master page (1), and click Publish button from the ribbon bar (2):

To proceed with publishing, click OK:

And now you're done! Your website just became compatible with the latest version of Internet Explorer.

Important: Enterprise Mode is On

If the IE shows a blue icon before the address, as shown below, it means that it will be forced to render using an earlier version of IE:

Solution

You need to contact your IT department and tell them to turn off the IE Enterprise Mode from the Group Policy Management tools.