Difference between “Browser Mode” and “Document Mode” in Internet Explorer

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I´m really glad that I must no more use IETester since IE6 support was dropped in our company and IE9 has some quite cool developer tools. I can set "Browser Mode" and "Document Mode" but I can´t tell the difference. Does anyone know it? This post also didn´t help me out: IE8 browser mode vs document mode

Thanks

Best Answer

Document Mode is what the browser uses to render the page: IE9, IE8, IE7 or Quirks. Browser Mode sets how the browser identifies itself to the web server and to JavaScript.

From a testing standpoint, it seems unnecessarily confusing that these are two separate options and you usually want to change both, for example, set the Browser mode to IE8 and the Document Mode to IE8 to get IE9 to pretend to be IE8.

There's also the Internet Exploer 9 Compatibility View option for Browser Mode. This seems to be the same as IE7 mode except the user-agent string also says "Trident/5.0" (Trident is the IE layout engine).

Related Solutions

Running Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 8 on the same machine

I wouldn't do it. Use virtual PCs instead. It might take a little setup, but you'll thank yourself in the long run. In my experience, you can't really get them cleanly installed side by side and unless they are standalone installs you can't really verify that it is 100% true-to-browser rendering.

Update: Looks like one of the better ways to accomplish this (if running Windows 7) is using Windows XP mode to set up multiple virtual machines: Testing Multiple Versions of IE on one PC at the IEBlog.

Update 2: (11/2014) There are new solutions since this was last updated. Microsoft now provides VMs for any environment to test multiple versions of IE: Modern.IE

JavaScript: Can I detect IE9 if it’s in IE7 or IE8 compatibility mode

Actually the user agent string is different for IE9 when being run in IE7 compatibility mode, so this would be one of the best ways to distinguish between different IE versions.

Introducing IE9’s User Agent String:

Similar to IE8, IE9’s Compatibility View will map to IE7 Standards Mode, and IE9’s UA string when in Compatibility View will be:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/5.0)
In Compatibility View, IE9 reports itself as IE7 through the application version number (Mozilla/4.0) and version token (MSIE 7.0). This is done for compatibility. An incremented Trident token, from ‘Trident/4.0’ to ‘Trident/5.0’, allows websites to distinguish between IE9 running in Compat View and IE8 running in Compat View.

(emphasis added by me). So the user agent string is the same as it reports itself being "Mozilla/4.0" and MSIE 7.0, but IE9 will always be Trident/5.0 - no matter whether it says MSIE 7.0, MSIE 8.0 or MSIE 9.0.

Actually you should check out this great compilation: Browser ID (User-Agent) Strings or even better useragentstrings.com

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Running Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 8 on the same machine

JavaScript: Can I detect IE9 if it’s in IE7 or IE8 compatibility mode

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