Citrix User Profile Manager (UPM) ensures that the user’s personal settings are applied to the user’s virtual desktop and applications, regardless of the location and end point device.
Internet Explorer (IE) is one of the widely used browsers in the Corporate and Enterprise level. User can personalize various settings and configurations which persist in successive sessions.
User can store or customize various settings and configurations in Internet Explorer. Citrix UPM supports the roaming browser user settings.
Supporting IE 10/IE 11 migration introduced few issues and this blog is intended to propagate how UPM (v 5.2) addresses it.
Mainly 3 failures were observed.
- Cookies migration.
- History migration.
- Stale cookies deletion.
In case of IE Protected/Enhanced Protected mode (EPM) Cookies and History information in IE10 and IE11 are not preserved by UPM as of now (until v5.1). Reason for failure is mainly because UPM doesn’t preserve few metadata information about Registry and File system objects specific to these IE versions.
Also, Stale cookies were not getting deleted even if the policy is enabled. Microsoft is doing away with the old “Index.dat” file which it used to process and delete stale cookies.
The aforesaid issues with History and Cookies have been fixed in UPM for IE Protected mode (from v5.2 onwards). UPM now preserves necessary Meta data pertaining to Cookies and History successfully. Stale cookies are always getting deleted irrespective of policy being set or not (Stale cookies policy for IE 10/IE 11 is always set to true internally and they will be processed, however, for previous versions of IE, stale cookies policy will stay same) .
UPM solution
As explained above, both the issues need to be tackled separately since the root causes for both are different.
- Handling of cookie issue:
- In “protected mode”, appropriate ACLs will be set for the aforesaid registry objects after the user log in.
- For “Stale cookies”, Access time, Modified time and Creation time will be restored.
- Handling of history issue:
- File attribute (FILE_ATTRIBUTE_SYSTEM) will be set on the aforesaid file system object after the first user log in.
UPM now preserved the time stamp values for the mirrored folders. Hence,To over fix the stale cookies problem, the folders should be added to Mirror list.
The following folders should be added to mirror folder list.
- AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCookies
- AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WebCache
- AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies
This way, UPM now has solved the above issues and user can now roam IE and experience the same configuration and settings across all his environments.
Previous IE Versions
All behaviors of previous IE Versions remain unchanged.
History – Browsing History from bruin or older profiles will not be persisting
Cookies – Cookies created by using bruin or older profile will be persisting
State cookies – Will not be handled; these cookies will remain forever as part of profile until unless deleted manually.
