When developing high end web applications which use a JSON proxy or service, you’ll probably find using Chrome, Safari or Firefox w/ Firebug to be the best for development use… I rarely use IE8/9 because development on IE still feels quite clunky… the lack of a “Inspect Element” (right-click) feature is also annoying.

So when we call a JSON web service directly through Internet Explorer, we will get an annoying popup message because it doesn’t know how to handle the request. I prefer to view this JSON package directly in the browser, as I do in Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

Here’s how to do it by modifying the Windows Registry:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
;
; Tell IE to open JSON documents in the browser.
; 25336920-03F9-11cf-8FD0-00AA00686F13 is the CLSID for the "Browse in place" .
;
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Mime\Database\Content Type\application/json]"CLSID"="{25336920-03F9-11cf-8FD0-00AA00686F13}""Encoding"=hex:08,00,00,00

If you’re familiar with using the Windows Registry, I don’t need to tell you how to do this. Just look at the key above and fill in the appropriate data. The easier way to do this, is to open up Notepad, copy and paste the above code, and name the file as a .reg file. When you double-click the .reg file, and allow it to run, the registry is updated for you, and your Internet Explorer will breath new life.