Pradeep K. Pant Blog

Microsoft Edge and IE issue again and workaround

So here again a post on Microsoft issues though in past I have already written several posts on different issues from Microsoft. Here are few of them:

Year 2011- Message: Invalid argument: IE 8 Issue

Year 2012 - Authentication in Office documents and Apache in IE8/IE9 on Win 7

Year 2019 -IE11 issue with arrow and includes JavaScript method

Year 2019 - Microsoft Visio and infamous Windings font

So you see I am reporting and writing about MS issues for almost 10 years 😭 But they don’t change!

Anyways, lets talk about current issue:

So, I have a web based application where I open a pop-up window using window.open() method while clicking on a object/url. If I click on another URL then the same pop-up should get updated with new info and should bring in front. Quite simple operation! This works fine in Chrome, Firefox but when I tested the same in IE11 I saw that content of the pop-up window got updated on clicking on another object/url but the window remained in background. This is very annoying.. So I thought IE is always full of bugs and guys from redmond have made a new browser which they project as in lines with Chrome and FF so I thought that it must have been solved.. but to my surpirse in Edge also this doesn’t work means that your pop-up window is updated in background but loose focus. This means that you always have to go and check your pop-up manually. And, this is not specific to my application check window.open example at W3C School

So what is the solution – After playing with some configration params of IE 11, I figured it out that if you do the below setting then it gets resolved.

Internet options => Tabs -> Always open pop-ups in new window

It’s almost 5 years our beloved Microsoft has not solved this issue in Edge not even answered this question .. they took out a feature for handling pop-ups from IE11 with no new solution in edge.. so inconsistent as always!

As Microsoft has not given any solution for Edge so I have used a workaround which is using

window_name.focus()

method.

Example code:

	var win_name = 
	window.open('url', 'TestPage', 'width=700,height=750,resizable,scrollbars,top=200,left=200');
	// have to call .focus for IE 11 and Edge to bring refreshed window in front
	win_name.focus();

btw I don’t use and recommend IE, edge but we have to use for testing our product because some of the IT managers still advice IE to their organization and as a product we have to fix silly Microsoft bugs and sometimes customer thinks our software is buggy 😭

Cheers!

Stay Safe.