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Internet Explorer 11 at it again, breaks Microsoft's own CRM software

Customers advised to use old version ... or another browser

Compatibility problems continue to plague Internet Explorer 11, with some Microsoft customers once again complaining that the company's latest browser doesn't work with one of its own products.

Users first raised red flags about IE11 in October, when reports surfaced that the browser was rendering a number of sites strangely, including several Google properties and Microsoft's own Outlook.com.

Microsoft apparently released a fix for those problems – although exactly why the issues cropped up to begin with is not entirely clear – but now Redmond's latest and greatest browser seems to be at it again. And as before, it's a Microsoft product that's taking the hit.

On Thursday, Microsoft service engineer Daria Barteneva blogged that customers of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online are having problems running the initial configuration of new CRM Online instances, including free trials.

Barteneva posted a workaround for the problem, but it won't be much of a comfort for affected customers:

Log in to MOP from a machine with an older IE version (IE10 for example) and rerun the configuration from there OR use compatibility view.

Compatibility View is Microsoft's name for the mode that makes the latest version of Internet Explorer behave as if it's an earlier version, complete with that version's rendering quirks and web standards incompatibilities.

Accompanying Barteneva's terse blog post, Microsoft's support organization has also published an updated document listing the browser compatibility for Dynamics CRM. In it, the latest supported version of Internet Explorer is listed as IE10. What's more, only the desktop version of IE10 is supported – the touch-enabled version for the Windows 8 Start Screen won't work.

All of this will be a bummer for anyone who upgraded to Windows 8.1, because IE11 was included as part of the upgrade and there's no way to roll back to the previous version once you're running Redmond's latest OS. Switching to Compatibility View or finding another machine to run the setup will be these customers' only options (that is, assuming they're still not ready to switch to a different browser).

More importantly, however, it's a bummer for Microsoft's Internet Explorer team, which has been touting IE11 as its best-performing and most standards-compliant browser to date. By comparison, the Dynamics CRM browser compatibility document lists the supported versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari simply as "Latest Version", without restrictions.

Microsoft has yet to say when and if it plans to release a patch for either IE11 or Dynamics CRM that will improve compatibility between the two products. ®

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