Local AJAX calls with IE11

Here is a little snippet to get local AJAX (with jQuery) working when running content locally in IE 11. Local content is not allowed to use the XMLHttpRequest but it can use the proprietary ActiveXObject, so this tells jQuery to always use the ActiveXObject if it’s available.

I needed to use this to run local content on a Surface RT which doesn’t have IIS or any other browsers. This allowed me to run content that relied on AJAX from the desktop in IE modern.

$.ajaxSetup({
  xhr: function() {
    if ('ActiveXObject' in window) {
      return new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
    }
    else
    {
      return new XMLHttpRequest();
    }
  }
});