deadhead
meta/msapplication

meta name="msapplication-*"

Internet Explorer pinned-site and Start-tile metadata; nothing that still ships reads it.

  • Avoid
  • Unnecessary
Severity
UnnecessaryWorks, but is dead weight.
Basis
Vendor documentationOne vendor's documentation is the source.
Detectable
YesMatched exactly. Autofixable when the rule carries a fix.
Matches
meta[name^="msapplication-" i]Element rule, inside <head>.
Fix
Removes the element
Impacts
Maintainability
Related
meta/http-equiv-x-ua-compatible, meta/application-name

Internet Explorer 9 let a user pin a site to the Windows taskbar, and Internet Explorer 11 extended that to live tiles on the Windows 8 and 10 Start screen. A site described its tile with a family of Microsoft-only <meta> names: msapplication-TileColor, msapplication-TileImage, msapplication-square150x150logo, msapplication-notification, msapplication-config and more. Favicon generators still emit the whole set, usually with a browserconfig.xml alongside.

Why avoid

Nothing that still ships reads them. The metadata belonged to IE11’s pinned-sites feature, and Microsoft’s own documentation for it now lives under previous versions, marked archived. The Internet Explorer 11 desktop application went out of support on June 15, 2022 and has since been permanently disabled on Windows 10; the EdgeHTML-based Edge went out of support on March 9, 2021. Edge’s IE mode renders legacy pages inside Edge and does not offer Start-screen pinning, so it gives the tags no reader either.

The surface they configured is gone too. Windows 11 dropped live tiles outright — “Live Tiles are no longer available” — so a tile colour, a 310×150 logo and a notification polling URI describe something the operating system no longer draws.

The only remaining consumer is the IE11 desktop app on long-term-servicing Windows 10, Windows Server and Embedded installs, pinning to a Windows 10 Start menu — no supported consumer browser. For everyone else the block is dead weight in every page’s <head>, and msapplication-config keeps a second file, browserconfig.xml, alive for nobody. The tags were never standardised, so there is no spec that will revive them.

Use instead

A web app manifest. Browsers that install or pin sites read the name, colours and icons from it:

<link rel="manifest" href="/app.webmanifest">
{
  "name": "Example",
  "short_name": "Example",
  "theme_color": "#cc241d",
  "background_color": "#ffffff",
  "icons": [{ "src": "/icon-192.png", "type": "image/png", "sizes": "192x192" }]
}

Delete browserconfig.xml along with the tags.

Detectability

Fully detectable. <meta name> holds a single value rather than a token set, so the selector is a case-insensitive prefix match on msapplication- — the documented names mix case freely (msapplication-TileColor). It deliberately leaves application-name alone: IE used it for the pinned-site title, but it is a standard HTML metadata name with its own meaning, and meta/application-name covers it.

The fix removes each element. That includes msapplication-config with content="none", which only ever told IE11 not to request /browserconfig.xml when a site was pinned; without IE11 there is no request to suppress.

Resources

This page is generated from content/rules/meta/msapplication.md, the same file the linter is built from. Think the rule is wrong, or that browsers moved on? Say so — that is the most useful issue you can file.