I was asked this week to develop a new group policy for IE10+, I’m very new to group policy and quickly discovered that it is very different to IE9 and earlier where the proxy setting were stored in the Internet Explorer Maintenance Tab.  After a quick Google (or Bing if your being sponsored by Microsoft), I discovered that the Internet Explorer settings for Internet Explorer 10 and above are stored in User Configuration -> Preferences -> Control Panel Settings -> Internet Settings. Right click and choose New -> Internet Explorer 10.

So what if you want to do an Internet Explorer Group policy for IE11 or above? Well Internet Explorer 10 covers Internet Explorer 10 to 99!!!

The options were virtually identical so I set up the group policy to match the one that had been developed for IE9 and below and then clicked Apply and clicked OK and waited for the group policy to come down…… and nothing happened, the group policy did not apply.

Bemused I looked around on a few forums and lots of people seemed to have the same difficultly getting the policy to apply but I couldn’t really find an answer, until I came across this http://blog.thesysadmins.co.uk/group-policy-internet-explorer-10-death-iem.html an excellent post which told me that my group policy did not apply because I didn’t press F5!

Your policy will only apply if you press F5 to apply settings on the currently selected tab or F6 to apply the currently selected setting. if the changes have not been applied then any changes are underlined with red dots. Once you press F5 or F6 and the changes have been applied the changes will be underlined with green dots.

Sounds simple when you know how, but trying to solve this was frustrating and yet the solution was so simple, so I thought it was worthy of a blog post.

Shaun