I have an excel sheet , sheet.xlsx, in a sharepoint 2010 library,
http://sharepoint, which is in trusted sites.
I have an IE (11) favorite for that excel sheet.
I have a desktop shortcut.url
if I browse to http://sharepoint/library/AllItems.aspx, and click on the link for sheet.xlsx, Excel opens sheet.xls.
if I click on the IE favorite for sheet.xlsx, I get the little yellow bar at the bottom of the screen asking me if I want to open it.
if I click on the desktop shortcut for sheet.xls, I get the big white "View Downloads - Internet Explorer" pop-up window asking if I want to open it.
I want all three of these methods to just open excel. this is not just with excel documents, i'm only using it as an example. I assume this is a security setting in IE somewhere, but i'm looking at the GPO settings for my trusted sites zone, and nothing is set to "prompt." every setting is specifically enabled or disabled. I also find it curious that the behavior is different depending on how I open the document.
i'll also mention that the users experiencing this issue were upgraded from ie8 to ie11 this week, and did not see this behavior in ie8 (which is why they are complaining about it now). the same IE security GPO was being applied to the users when they had IE8 that's being applied now that they have ie11.