SharePoint List Settings Issue: “Internet Explorer is required to use this feature.”

This one belongs firmly in the “things that make you go hmm…” department.

Let’s say you are a good do-be like me and you use all of the Microsoft products that you can get your hands on. You’ve got email and SharePoint running on Office 365, you use all the Office applications and tools, you’re up to date on your version of Internet Explorer… You get the picture.

Well, sometimes all that good behavior doesn’t pay. Today I wanted to edit an InfoPath form attached to a list in SharePoint 2013 on premises. (You won’t run into this problem on Office365, at least it doesn’t happen in my tenant. Office365 seems to know IE11.) I went to the List Settings and clicked on the Form Settings link. I’m using Internet Explorer 11, so I’m as up to date as I can be without getting into beta territory.

Lo and behold:

Yup. I’m using Internet Explorer and the message says “Internet Explorer is required to use this feature.” The issue is that the on premises install that I’m working with doesn’t understand Internet Explorer 11. It *should* see it as Internet Explorer, though, and give me a better message. I’m not exactly sure what patch level we’re on, but I think it’s pretty close to current.

Fortunately, there is an easy fix for this. Simply hit F12 to bring up the Developer Tools and scroll all the way down to the bottom of the left side icon list.The one you want to click on looks like this:

That will give you access to the Emulation settings. Change the User agent string setting to Internet Explorer 10.

The page will reload and now SharePoint will understand that you are the good do-be that you are, speaking IE10ish instead of IE11ish. After you do your work, it’s a good idea to switch back to default so that you are speaking IE11ish again.

The Emulation settings give you a bunch of other nice tools (want to act like an XBox360?), so if you have interest in testing things in different browsers types, etc., be sure to check out the rest of the settings as well.