I come across this issue from time to time. I’ll paste something into the URL box to do a Google search. Usually I add double-quotes, sometimes I removed tabs. Sometimes Internet Explorer refuses to do the Google search from the URL box. It gives me a page that is blank except for a ‘#’ in the upper-left corner, and a popup that says ‘Internet Explorer has modified this page to help prevent cross-site scripting’. I then have to go to google-dot-com and search from there.
What is this ‘cross-site scripting’, and why won’t IE let me search for the string I want?
Internet Explorer 11 came out in 2008, I believe, and has gotten very dated over time. I get certificate security warnings a lot and have connection problems with certain sites. I’ve basically stopped using it. I use Firefox and Chrome with Windows 7 at work and Edge, Chrome or Firefox on my Windows 10 laptop at home.
It’s a security vulnerability that can be triggered and/or detected in number of different ways. In this case something in the search results is making IE’s security flag the results as potentially risky. Since the browsers each use their own algorithms and data sets to identify possible XSS threats you will get different results.
The quote above works fine on my IE and Chrome, so I don’t think that’s it. I suspect there’s something in one of the results that triggers it, not the search string. That’s not really how XSS works, so it’s unlikely to be the cause.