Does anybody know what version of IE is used in the IDE (the embedded IE browser).
Thanks

edit: I'm using PhpED v16

I think it is the same version as whatever you have installed in Windows, rather than being a special version. All PhpED does is show the browser window within PhpED.

I never use the embedded browser windows because they lack a lot of useful features that the external browsers provide.

Hi. All valid points of course.
The reason I want to know the IE version is because I need to ensure that a specific site is still functional in IE8 and it would be much quicker to use the embedded browser than start up a win-xp virtual machine. I noticed that the embedded IE does not behave like my IE11 (It's not parsing a lot of CSS3 and even refuses to render SVG images) but at this stage I'm thinking that PHPed is telling IE11 to run in emulation mode (of what version of IE, I'm not sure - can probably determine that with some script?)

The user agent string should be good for identifying IE 8 because it did contain a version back then.

I seem to remember that IE was one of the browsers that did not support different versions running side-by-side on the same computer, at least not officially.

However, it could be running in a compatibility mode and in my PhpED it is showing as MSIE 7.0, even if I use an X-UA-Compatible meta tag to force different compatibility and even though that compatibility does seem to work. Maybe X-UA-Compatible is your answer? There might be a command line or DDE option that can change the compatibility mode setting from PhpED.

You could also have a look at BrowseEmAll. I have seen little browser specific styling issues that do not show, but it does give an idea of overall browsing compatibility.

My last site was heavily HTML5 and CSS 3.0 done to a client's exacting design and features; it fails miserably in IE 8 ! Also discovered Android 2.x stock browsers are quite bad with various issues that look like bugs, particularly with JS.

Tell me about it I tested on an old Nexus 1 and it looked like it was having pretty much the same issues as IE8.

Microsoft now makes downloadable VMs available for testing in different versions of IE:

(looks like the forum doesn't like links)

Great that you can select the VM platform you need it in.

The forum will let you do links after you've made a few more posts

I do myself use VM's for testing different versions of IE - here's the link for anyone that is interested https://dev.windows.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/windows/

Ha, ok, that makes sense

For some reasons Microsoft turned on emulation mode for embedded IE, starting with ~ IE8.
There is a workaround to get it working properly (turn off emulation mode)
http://www.cyotek.com/blog/configuring-the-emulation-mode-of-an-internet-explorer-webbrowser-control