Internet Explorer 11 causes Access Denied error in OpenLayers.Format.XML

Internet Explorer 11 causes a 0x80070005 - JavaScript runtime error: Access is denied.
in the OpenLayers.Format.XML class when the browser tries to open an XMLHttpRequest at the req.open(... statement.

...
function() {
    var req = new XMLHttpRequest();
    req.open("GET", "data:" + "text/xml" +
                         ";charset=utf-8," + encodeURIComponent(text), false);