Need AOL help: upgraded from IE7 to IE9, but useragentstring shows IE7

Well... THAT'S WHY THEY PAY ME THE BIG BUCKS!!!

CASE CLOSED! PROBLEM SOLVED!! MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!! WE EMERGE VICTORIOUS!!

NO MATCH FOR THE KID.

Persistence pays off. I'm going to take great pride and joy in marking this thread "SOLVED"!


That was it!!! Upgrade to AOL 9.7 instead of stopping at AOL 9.5 is all that it took. Absolutely no other changes to anything anywhere. Exact same IE9, configured exactly as before. Changed NOTHING.

Interestingly, as was previously mentioned AOL 9.7 now identifies itself as a version of Chrome in "useragentstring":





and... proof is in the pudding... here is that problem Nordstrom web page, now perfectly displayed using AOL 9.7 (with no broken links, but true pictures instead):

Hopefully you will not get another call because another website cannot correctly parse that user string from AOL 9.7 desktop. My first exposure to this was because a website saw AOL 9.7 as Chrome 21.

UsernameIssues said:

Hopefully you will not get another call because another website cannot correctly parse that user string from AOL 9.7 desktop. My first exposure to this was because a website saw AOL 9.7 as Chrome 21.

Ugghh!

I already have another promised "service call" (i.e. another RealVNC support friend) on a Win7 machine still running AOL 9.5. And all Windows Updates are applied so that IE11 is what's running... with AOL 9.5!

And of course now that I appreciate the consequences here, it's obvious why I'm getting the complaint about a "cousin" of the earlier issue with the Nordstrom site. In this case it's some game site (Scrabble or Canasta or something) which is also complaining about "your browser is no longer supported".

Well, here's what IE11 launched by AOL 9.5 looks like in its "useragentstring":






In contrast, here is the value from an "external" IE11 browser window:






So, this one's due for a similar upgrade from AOL 9.5 to 9.7, and hopefully it will be compatible with IE11 as installed.

I've already run into my own problems with IE11 not being compatible with several mainframe VPN connectivity JAVA apps. There is no current solution, as there's something clearly very different here about what MS did in IE11 relating to JAVA. The only "workaround" is to back off to IE10, which still works fine.

Anyway, this is all very useful and interesting information learned from today's discoveries.

I'll stick to my statement that AOL9.7 is just a wrapper for Chrome 21. Maybe it picks the rendering agent based on the website visited. Below is a screenshot of the cache files from AOL and Chrome. Glancing at them via notepad shows the data structure to be the same.





This is what I looked at several days ago while solving issues in a software specific forum.

I could be wrong about the AOL/Chrome connection. I don't have anyone that I support that still uses AOL - so I'm not interested in digging much deeper. But notice the info presented here: What's A User Agent?



The parenthesis hold info about compatibility.
That info is preceded by the browser ID and version.

For AOL 9.7, there seems to be several browser IDs/versions:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64)
AppleWebKit/537.1 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome/21.0.1180.0
AOL/9.7 AOLBuild/4343.2039.US
Safari/537.1

While I'm boring readers about user agent strings, I might as well say that IE11 changed things by no longer including the MSIE info in the compatibility section. This broke lots of websites... but the websites should not have been using the info that way in the first place.

UsernameIssues said:

...I might as well say that IE11 changed things by no longer including the MSIE info in the compatibility section. This broke lots of websites.

Yes, you can see that in my screenshot shown in my last post, which is from "external IE11".

That's why I say that while I believe the upgrade from AOL 9.5 to 9.7 is the very least I must do to solve this other friend's issue, it may also be necessary to back out IE11 down to IE10. It's possible that the upgrade to 9.7 is inadequate to support IE11, period, no better than 9.5 but failing in a slightly different way.

Won't know until I see what the actual current site symptom is, and how it responds to the 9.5->9.7 upgrade.

I agree with your assessment that 9.7 does in fact look like Chrome inside.

I don't think that backing out IE11 will help much, but keep us posted.

From here: AOL Desktop Version 9.7 - Download It Today!

It does seem that IE10 is the highest IE that they list.
I'm just not clear of the interaction between AOL and IE.

UsernameIssues said:

I don't think that backing out IE11 will help much, but keep us posted.

It does seem that IE10 is the highest IE that they list.
I'm just not clear of the interaction between AOL and IE.

I already know from the actual working Boston Win7 laptop running AOL 9.7 and IE10 that the combination definitely works at least with the Nordstrom site!).

For sure I haven't had a call for help from there... only from Florida with the Vista laptop.

What is unknown at the moment is the nature of the problem site attempting to be accessed in that now known problematic setup of AOL 9.5 and IE11. I'll be interested to see what "external" IE11 does with that same site.

Anyway, I await the promised phone call the next time this pops up on that machine.

Again, many thanks for your insights and experience and very helpful and informative comments on the issues within this thread.

dsperber said:

~~~
I already know from the actual working Boston Win7 laptop running AOL 9.7 and IE10 that the combination definitely works at least with the Nordstrom site!).
~~~

Correct, but I think that you will find that it worked solely on the basis of the user agent string. I installed AOL 9.7 on W7/IE8 and the user agent string was the same. I could also visit the Nordstrom website without any problems.

I would just move the other person to AOL 9.7 and leave IE11 as is. If AOL 9.7 is indeed using Chrome 21, then it probably contains the flaw that allows Chrome to be run at the system integrity level. That is a black hat's dream exploit.

According to this: Google Chrome 33.0.1750.58 Beta - History - FileHippo.com

21 is a pretty old version of Chrome.