How To Disable Internet Explorer First Run Welcome Screen Pop Up

With Internet Explorer 8 and 9, when you open it up for thefirst time, you are presented with a a “Welcome to Internet Explorer” page. Not so bad when you do it once when you configure your own PC, but when you are deploying test servers or logging in to multiple machines, then it is a pain in the backside to have it keep popping it up.

Well using Group Policy, you can disable it across your AD environment.

1. Press Start button + R (the Run command), type gpedit.msc and press Enter to launch the Group Policy Editor.

Note: In an Active Directory environment, open gpmc.msc and either edit an existing GPO, or create a new one and link it to the domain level, or to an OU of your choice.

2. In the left pane, expand User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Internet Explorer.

3. On the right pane, double-click on “Prevent performance of First Run Customize settings“. A new settings window will open up.

4. Set the value to “Enabled”.

5. In the options section you must choose one of the two options from the dropdown menu:

• Go directly to “Welcome To IE” page
• Go directly to home page

You need to choose one of the two, otherwise the configuration will not work.

The first option configures IE to skip the Welcome screen and go directly to your home page, whatever it is.

The second option configures IE to skip the Welcome screen and and go to the “Welcome to Internet Explorer” page directly.

6. Click Apply to save the settings then click OK and close the Group Policy Editor window.

7. Press Start button + R (the Run command) and type gpupdate /force and press Enter to refresh the Group Policy on the computer.

Cufon Update for Internet Explorer 9

OK, I did hastily speak a little too quickly about Internet Explorer 9 breaking my site before doing some full investigation.

Well I have done a little Googling and some proding and probing, and discovered that a JavaScript file that my theme uses, was not IE9 compatible. By looking at the source from within IE9, I could see that the HTML was generating the missing text, then scrolling up to the top of the page, I found the JS file that was used to call the custom fonts.

The JavaScript file in question was by Cufon. All I had to do, was download the latest one, overwriting the existing one, and everything is back to normal!

Internet Explorer 9 Release

I don’t like installing Beta or Release Candidate software in production environments – testing places only. So I was eager to get to work today so that I could install Internet Explorer 9 on my laptop and work laptop. You can get a copy here.

It is a safe and easy install; my personal laptop did need a reboot however. It is a much cleaner browser, clearly designed to maximise display space – like Google Chrome. THe Favorites Star has now been moved to the right, and if you click it then it dynamically drops the list however if you click the side arrow to permeanantly fix it to the browser, THEN it pops up on the left! Annoying. Pick a side, and stay there.

I have only been running the browser for the past hour, so I need to trawl through more sites to see how impacts the rest of the web as well as how I interact with it.

Worse point of all: it breaks my blog! It seeems to “hide” my blog post titles and doesn’t quite render the page how I like it. I double checked it in Firefox and it works fine. I aslo enabled the IE Compatibility View and the site renders as I want….ho hum, back to the drawing board!