IE11 DOM normalize doesn't work with table row
<p>I'd like to normalize table rows. This works like a charm, except in IE (tested with IE 11).</p>

<p>I've created a demo snippet to demonstrate the issue:</p>

<p><div class="snippet" data-lang="js" data-hide="false" data-console="true" data-babel="false">
<div class="snippet-code">
<pre class="snippet-code-js lang-js prettyprint-override"><code>$(function() {
  $("table tbody tr span").each(function() {
    var $this = $(this);
    var $parent = $this.parent();
    $this.replaceWith($this.html());
    $parent[0].normalize();
  });
});</code></pre>
<pre class="snippet-code-html lang-html prettyprint-override"><code>&lt;link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/bootstrap/3.3.6/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" /&gt;
&lt;script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"&gt;&lt;/script&gt;
&lt;table class="table table-striped table-hover"&gt;
  &lt;thead&gt;
    &lt;tr&gt;
      &lt;th&gt;President&lt;/th&gt;
      &lt;th&gt;Birthplace&lt;/th&gt;
    &lt;/tr&gt;
  &lt;/thead&gt;
  &lt;tbody&gt;
    &lt;tr&gt;
      &lt;td&gt;&lt;span&gt;Zach&lt;/span&gt;ary Taylor&lt;/td&gt;
      &lt;td&gt;Barboursville, Virginia&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;/tr&gt;
  &lt;/tbody&gt;
&lt;/table&gt;</code></pre>
</div>
</div>
</p>

<p>This replaces the <code>&lt;span&gt;</code> element with its content. After this step the node will look like:</p>

<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/hKL5v.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/hKL5v.png" alt="DOM Node"></a></p>

<p>Then, <code>normalize()</code> is called to merge the splitted text nodes. However, in IE11 the text nodes are still splitted.</p>

<p>I can't see any issue from my side. What's the cause of this problem and what could be the solution?</p>

<hr>

<p>As it turned out that this is a IE11 bug, I've filled in a <strong><a href="https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platform/issues/8727426/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">bug report</a></strong>!</p>