How to fix You need to upgrade your browser message

A few months ago, I needed to urgently go to a couple of unrelated websites. One was an industry online forum and the other was a government website.

For some strange reason, the websites told me that I needed to upgrade my browser as I was running IE6 which was too old! I thought this very strange as I had upgraded from IE7 to IE8 a short time before this. So, out of desperation, I had no choice but to reinstall IE8 again but the frustrating thing was that the problem still persisted. The forum website showed a message at the bottom of every webpage that I visited, which was was fairly innocuous, but the government website wouldn't let me access their form download webpage at all and this was very important at the time. Because of the urgency involved, I was forced to use a neighbour's computer to print off the forms that I needed.

Anyway, after a few days, I managed to figure out what the problem was and therefore fix the issue on my own computer. However, recently this problem has reared its ugly head again so I thought I'd write a Hubpage in order to save anyone else the wasted time, hair pulling and frustration that I went through.

Here is a report of what I found as well as the fix.

The issue appears to be a corrupt upgrade of Internet Explorer that leaves it sending out it's "User Agent" information which tells websites what browser version it is.

I found out that in my case Internet Explorer was, in fact, telling websites that it was both IE6 & IE8!

Anyway here are the steps to follow to fix this issue:

1) First off, go to the website in the link below and see if there is any more than one entry for MSIE listed under "User Agent String explained". If you're using IE8 then you should only see "MSIE 8.0"

http://www.useragentstring.com/

If there is more than one entry do the following:

1) Close IE

2) I can't stress this enough...CREATE A SYSTEM RESTORE POINT!
Do this via start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/System Restore (bottom entry in column)

3) Launch registry editor via start/Run and type "regedit" (without quotes) into the white "Open" field and press OK.

Open this key:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Internet Settings\User Agent\Post Platform]

4) Right click the "Post Platform" key in the left hand window & choose "export". Export this key to a location of your choice. If there are any problems with IE you can double click this key to restore the registry or failing that, use the System Restore point mentioned in step1

5) Delete any "User Agent String" entries found in the right hand window leaving just the default entry. In my case MSIE 6.0 was listed.

Next, right-click the Post Platform entry in the left hand window and select Permissions.

6) Click the "Advanced" button.

7) Un-tick the box "Inherit from parent the permission
entries..." and tick the box "Replace permissions on
all child objects..."

You'll be given another chance to save your changes so I would press the "save" button.

8) Press ok a couple of times to save your changes & to get out of this registry editor and restart IE.

9) Revisit http://www.useragentstring.com/ and make sure that you now only have one MSIE entry in the User Agent field.

For instance it now shows for my browser:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Disclaimer:
I am not responsible for any issues caused by this method and do not recommend you try it unless you are confident editing the registry!