Why does CSS Hyphenation not work in IE11 and MS Edge Legacy?

Question

I am working on a intranet portal for a large company in Germany. Since in big companies tech processes sometimes run a bit slower, they still use IE11 and the old MS Edge browser.

Since these old browsers support CSS hyphens: auto (See: https://caniuse.com/css-hyphens), I developed a little CSS, which enables CSS hypens:

.hyphens {
    hyphens: auto;
    -ms-hyphens: auto;
}

So wherever I set class "hyphens", CSS hyphens shall get activated.

This works in my computer's installations of IE11 and legacy Edge, but not on my customer's clients. Neither in their Edge nor IE11 browsers.

I checked that on those computers CSS gets correctly loaded. If I add a rule like

background: red;

to class "hyphens", it gets correctly applied. Just hyphenation doesn't get applied.

I found out that on my local Edge version differs from the one my customer has. I use Edge and IE11 in Versions

Microsoft Edge 42.17134.1098.0
Microsoft EdgeHTML 17.17134
IE11: 11.1667.17134.0

whereas my customer has

Microsoft Edge 44.17763.831.0
Microsoft EdgeHTML 18.17763
IE11: 11.1457.17763.0

installed.

We all use Windpw 10 and have German set as primary language (I think both IE11 and Edge use OS language, no separate browser language).

I tested with HTML language attribute set and not set. No difference for me (both cases working), no difference for my customer (both cases not working).

At the moment I have no idea left, why hyphens only seem to work on my machine. Is there maybe some setting I am not aware? Any hint how I can debug that? Is it possible that they get (de)activated via Windows group policy?

Regards and many thanks.

Answer 1

Your client may be missing the hyphenation dictionaries for the legacy MS browsers.

Unfortunately I am not aware of Windows Update packages which are actually supported for installation directly in Windows 10; the MSU packages with the spell checkers for IE 11 (KB2841134) seem to be the most recent ones available for download but they cannot be installed directly ("The update is not applicable to your computer").

However, it seems that the dictionaries can be deployed via file copy. Each dictionary consists of three files with the names MsSp7xx.alc, MsSp7xx.dub and MsSp7xx.lex, where xx is the language code (e.g. en-US or de etc.).

The dictionaries are installed here: %WINDIR%\Globalization\ELS\SpellDictionaries

To obtain the dictionaries, you can try as follows:

• Download the MSU file containing the dictionary here: https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=2841134

• Extract the dictionary files from the MSU on the Command Line:

expand ie-spelling-*.msu -f:Windows6.3-KB2849696-x86.cab .
md ie-spelling
expand Windows6.3-KB2849696-x86.cab -f:mssp7*.* -r ie-spelling

• Copy the three files from the subdirectories in the ie-spelling directory to %WINDIR%\Globalization\ELS\SpellDictionaries