IE11 switches to IE5 document mode and causes rendering issues in CMS 6 R2 edit mode)

  • Updated

If you use IE 11 to browse to Edit Mode of a CMS 6 R2 site, you may notice that edit mode preview is broken. Using F12 to get to Developer Tools, the document mode has switched to IE5 mode.

When the the CMS6 edit UI was created it was done with support for the browsers available at the time. CMS6 has since been superseded by the 7 and 8 release which better supports modern web technologies. The culprit is the IE document mode selection where the preview frame will end up in IE8 mode at most, but fixing this would require extensive work to the CMS 6 UI implementation and we believe development time is better spent on improving CMS8.

Therefore, there are 3 alternatives:

  • Make the site render acceptable in the preview under the circumstances. Possibly using tml5shiv https://github.com/afarkas/html5shiv
    • Our development team says that using html5shiv should help to sort out missing html5 elements and make it possible to style when in legacy IE rendering mode.
  • Accept a strange preview.
  • Upgrade to CMS 7+