14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has already shared lots of details on Internet Explorer 11 and Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1, but here is something that needs special attention.
It appears that Microsoft has made it so that Internet Explorer 11 fakes the user agent in order to fool Gmail that it’s Android 4.0 and iOS 7. This will allow Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1 users to visit the Android and/or iOS versions of Gmail, instead of the not so good looking Windows Phone version of the website.
According to WMPoweruser, Microsoft has included a new User Agent String that does just that. Here is the user agent that tricks Gmail into thinking it’s Android 4.0 or iOS 7:
“Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile; Windows Phone 8.1; Android 4.0; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; NOKIA; Lumia 930) like iPhone OS 7_0_3 Mac OS X AppleWebKit/537 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537”
This applies to all other Android and iOS versions of websites, which might lead to some curiosities. For example, there are websites that also have Android apps available for download, which means they will force you to download their Android app although you run a Windows Phone handset.
However, the experience does not seem to be as smooth as on an actual Android or iOS smartphone, as Windows Phone users report that the browser does not seem to respond or scroll accurately enough when visiting these websites.
Nevertheless, it looks like Microsoft is aware that Webkit is the way to go and made a compromise in order to offer Windows Phone users a browsing experience that is comparable to that of Android and/or iOS.
The problem is Google’s Gmail website, and many others, would detect when someone uses Internet Explorer and purposely dumb down the browsing experience of that user by sending him/her to a poor version of the site, even though IE easily supports the rich version.
This has been the case for a few years now, but Microsoft seems to have found a temporary solution to the issue. Hopefully, things will improve for Windows Phone users who are still using Internet Explorer as their default mobile browser.
Obviously, these are not the only improvements included in Internet Explorer 11, as Microsoft announced that hundreds of new features, enhancements, tweaks and bug fixes were made to its mobile browser.
All these changes will make their debut with Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1, which has just started to roll out to all Developer Preview users except HTC device owners.