I’ve just spent several hours fighting a piece of software almost as old as I am, in Internet Explorer.

(“almost” being 20 years younger than me, which is still pretty old for a browser).

When I finally got the issue fixed, I was irate, because I’ve actually had the same battle in the past, but forgot to document it, so here I am, documenting it. I hope it helps my readers, and I’m sure it will help me.

Internet Explorer, out of the box on a new machine is extremely annoying, because the default configurations usually do not allow you to do anything. That’s why I usually hurry into downloading Chrome, but sometimes this is not allowed as well (hint: internet options->security->custom level, enable file downloads). Today I wanted to install the Power BI On-premises Gateway on a new server. I quickly downloaded Chrome, downloaded the gateway software and installed it. When I started configuring it, I ran into the most annoying issue.

The first step in configuring the gateway is logging into a Power BI account. This is done using a small IE popup. And this is where I got stuck. I kept on entering my email and password, and kept on getting the fields to reset themselves. No error message, nothing. The user and password fields just become blank when you try to sign in. I tried all sorts of IE configurations and allowed pretty much any possible dangerous script to run. Still nothing.

Turns out there’s an IE option that you need to turn off, but that’s not under the IE options menu, but rather under server manager. You need to turn off “IE Enhanced Security Configuration“. Why on earth this is external to IE, I don’t know. Here’s a screenshot:

I hope it helps. Will certainly help me the next time I encounter it. Assuming I remember that I’ve written this article.

Cheers

Ziv.

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