So, the Version registry key lies. But why?
The Version key has lied since IE10 because there’s a common and decades-old practice of looking in the registry to retrieve the IE version. Unfortunately, much of the code that does so is inside product installers that refuse to proceed if a minimal target IE version (e.g. 6+) isn’t found. And that crusty old code never imagined there would one day exist a world in which IE’s major version was more than a single digit long. As a consequence, when IE10+ is installed, many products would refuse to install and users would receive bizarre and inaccurate error messages (“Internet Explorer 6 is required. This system only has Internet Explorer 1.”
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After examining the broad scope of the compatibility problem, the team decided to change the registry format such that the “true” IE version would be preceded by a leading “9.” to accommodate buggy version checkers. This approach generally worked well, but will confuse any software, like Test Studio, that was written prior to the version lie being introduced.
This is only one of many version lies.