Internet Explorer (IE) takes over entire screen on server 2012

Question

I have a few Windows 2012 servers that I've been tasked with setting up for my developers.

We interact with the servers using RDP.

One of the servers is behaving *very* strangely. If I start internet explorer by:

1. Start
2. Click on IE icon under the start listing

When I do this IE starts but it takes over the *ENTIRE* desktop and has a non-standard appearance -- the address bar is at the bottom and there doesn't seem to be a way to get back to the desktop short of starting the task manager and killing the IE process.

When this happens it looks like the following:

However, I've found that if I start IE by

1. Start
2. Search for Internet
3. Click on the return result

Then IE starts as expected in a window on the desktop in a standard format.

I'm assuming this is some obscure (horrible, IMO) interface that somehow got activated. How do I fix this to behave normally, as a standard desktop window?

Answer 1

Credits to https://superuser.com/a/727606/163596 by ElectronicGeek

Go to the Start Screen, and type in "Internet Options". Go to the Programs tab, and click the checkbox with "Open Internet Explorer tiles on the desktop."

Also, going to Internet Options from the Control Panel works if you can't search.

Answer 2

Internet Explorer 10, which was the default browser on Windows 8/Windows Server 2012 came with two display modes, the classical desktop UI and the "Metro UI", nowadays called "Modern UI". By default it started Metro UI, which is shown on your screenshot. You have two possibilities to prevent this:

• Change the pin on the start screen to the other UI. To do that, search for it (as you already did), then right click on the search result and click on "Pin to Start".

  

  To remove the Metro UI icon, just right click on it and click on "Unpin from Start"

  

• The second option is to upgrade to Internet Explorer 11. It doesn't come with the Modern UI and has only the desktop interface. Actually, it is strange that your system hasn't updated to IE11 yet, IE comes as a Windows Update and was released in 2013(!).