IE9 special quirks and workarounds (solved)

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IE9 has some peculiar quirks which it does not share with IE8 and IE10 (both of which work better than IE9). I've spent many, many hours chasing down each of these two quirks, and by posting them here I hope I can save others a similar amount of debugging time:

Unique to IE9:

1. Default security settings don't work. With the default security settings as shipped in IE9 (or if the user chooses "Reset all zones to default level"), extension.js is unable to send messages to background.js. You have to un-check the option, "Enable Protected Mode", in the Security tab of the Internet Options dialog. Once you do that, messages start flowing correctly, from extension.js to background.js. What makes this even more maddening, is that this ONLY a problem with the Production versions of Crossrider extensions. In Staging mode, this appears to not be an issue (it's fine to have Enable Protected Mode).

2. Must quote angle brackets in addInlineJS. If you're including a JS file onto the page context with addInlineJS, then, the JS file CANNOT contain left or right angle brackets. And I think single quotes might be a problem too, though I didn't verify that one for certain. In any case, I made the following substitutions in the JS file in order to make IE9 happy:

// left-angle-bracket: [backslash]u003c
// right-angle-bracket: [backslash]u003e
// single-quote: [backslash]u0027

The open and close angle brackets seem to trigger some kind of security filter.

Hope this save someone some time.