Testing the Website in Microsoft Edge

The browser changed with the upgrade

Microsoft's free upgrade to Windows 10 ends today. Over the past year a great many office and home computers have made the move, some of them without much planning.

On Windows 10, links open in Microsoft Edge by default. Internet Explorer is still there, but most people never go looking for it.

Edge is a new browser with its own engine, not Internet Explorer under a new name. It behaves much more like Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

A website only ever checked on the office computer in Internet Explorer may never have been opened in it.

What Edge does differently

• No compatibility view, the setting that made Internet Explorer imitate older versions.
• No ActiveX, Silverlight or Java add-ons.
• A new browser name, so scripts looking for Internet Explorer miss it.
• Fresh pop-up settings, without the exceptions saved over years in Internet Explorer.
• Its own PDF viewer, opening documents inside the browser.

The first is the one to understand, because it was often switched on years ago and then forgotten.

Why a working site can fail in Edge

For years Internet Explorer could be told, by a line in a page's code or a setting on the computer, to display a site the way an older version would.

Developers used that to keep older sites working without rebuilding them. Internet Explorer 11 still obeys the line, so the site looks fine on the office computer.

Edge has no such mode. It displays every page the modern way, as other current browsers do.

So a site that needs the old mode has usually been failing in Chrome and Safari as well. Edge simply brings the problem to the customers who used to see the site in Internet Explorer.

Scripts that check which browser is visiting can misfire too. Edge does not call itself Internet Explorer, so code written to make allowances for Internet Explorer does not make them for Edge.

Start with what earns money

Test the pages a customer acts on before the ones they read: contact and quote forms, bookings, the shop, online payment, any customer login, and downloads such as a price list.

Go all the way through each one. Submit a real form and confirm the email arrives with every field filled in.

For payments, use the payment provider's test mode, or make a small real purchase and refund it. Check that the customer comes back to your site afterwards and sees the confirmation.

Forms and payments in detail

Try every type of field: dates, drop-down menus, file uploads, and the box that asks visitors to prove they are human.

Watch for pop-ups. Edge blocks windows that a page opens on its own rather than in direct response to a click, and shows only a small notice at the bottom of the screen.

Some card payments add a verification step from the customer's bank, in a new window or a frame. If that step is blocked, the payment simply stalls.

Downloads deserve a look as well. Edge opens PDFs in its own viewer, so check that price lists display properly and that any fillable form can actually be filled in and saved.

A worked example

A compounding pharmacy, which prepares medications to the exact requirements of a prescription, takes refill requests through a form on its website. The site was built about eight years ago.

Staff use Windows 7 computers with Internet Explorer 11, where the form had always worked. Then several customers phoned to ask whether their requests had arrived. None had.

Those customers had new Windows 10 laptops. In Edge, the send button did nothing at all.

The form's script used a way of responding to clicks that only older versions of Internet Explorer understood. A line in the page told Internet Explorer 11 to behave like one of them, so the office never saw a problem.

Edge ignored the line. So did every phone, which meant the form had never worked on a phone either.

The web company replaced the script with standard code, removed the compatibility line and tested the form in Edge, Chrome, Firefox and Safari, on computers and phones.

Testing without a Windows 10 computer

If nobody in the office has Windows 10 yet, there are options. Microsoft offers free, time-limited copies of Windows 10 with Edge for testing, which run inside another computer.

A borrowed laptop works too. So does asking your web company, which should be testing in Edge as a matter of routine.

When something fails, press F12 in Edge to open its developer tools. Errors in the console appear in red, and a screenshot of them tells a developer more than any description.

What still needs Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer 11 is still part of Windows 10 and still receives security fixes, largely for the business systems that depend on it.

Older supplier portals, some business banking tools and internal systems built around ActiveX still work only there.

Edge's menu has an option to open the current page in Internet Explorer, and a managed office network can be set to send particular sites to it automatically.

Keep a short written list of those systems. Use Internet Explorer for them and Edge or another current browser for everything else.

Your own website should not be on that list.

The counter-case

A site built or rebuilt in the last few years, and tested in Chrome, Firefox and Safari, will almost always work in Edge too, since Edge follows the same standards.

And if Analytics shows that most visitors arrive on phones, with few on Windows computers, Edge is a smaller share of the audience.

Even then, the forms and the payment path deserve twenty minutes. Test them in Edge this week, and remove anything that depends on Internet Explorer's old modes.

Checking it in Edge

1. Open your website in Edge on Windows 10.
2. Submit every form and check what arrives.
3. Make a test payment through to confirmation.
4. Press F12 and note any red errors.
5. Check Analytics for visits from Edge.
6. List the systems that still need Internet Explorer.
7. Remove compatibility settings from your own site.

Step two is the one that matters most. A broken layout is obvious to anyone, but a form that fails silently looks exactly like a quiet week.

Which versions of Internet Explorer still get security fixes is covered in old Internet Explorer stops getting fixes today.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.