Force Browser Mode=IE8 and document mode=IE8 Standards

compatibility-modeinternet-explorer-8

I have a internal website hosted on IIS. I added the following meta code and also add http-header that the page should in IE8 Browser mode and document mode.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" >

We tested it on Visual Studio and and it works very well.

However, after we publish the code to another IIS server, one developer reported that the page render in "IE8 Comatiblity" Browser Mode which causes some JavaScript to fail.

There are more then 4 people working on the same windows server 2003 (RDP sessions).
We use the same version of IE (same IE actually). Everyone get "IE8" Browser Mode but one person gets "IE8 Compatibility" Browser Mode.

What else can make a specific user's IE load the page in a mode other than IE8 mode?

PS.
We checked the compatibility list in the IE; it is empty.

Best Answer

We found it was caused by the checkbox in "Compatibility view settings" - "Display intranet sites in Compatibility View".

It works well after uncheck the box.

PS. Is it true that "localhost" is excluded from intranet sites?

Related Solutions

Forcing IE8 browser display a website in IE6 standards mode

No, there is no IE6 Standards Mode, because Microsoft already abandoned IE6 Standards Mode with the IE7 release.

IE8 is built on — and is largely bug-compatible with — IE7. But IE7 Standards Mode was already not bug-compatible with IE6 Standards Mode. Microsoft aren't going to go crazy trying to dig out and re-implement IE6 bugs in IE8, when in their collective mind those bugs are already gone forever since developers surely must have updated their sites to work with IE7 already.

Of course in reality terrible webapps that rely on IE6 bugs do still exist, so a depressing number of corporates are still stuck with IE6, making the whole world worse for everyone. It would have been helpful to have introduced the EmulateIEn functionality in IE7 so that IE6 bug-compatibility could be preserved. However no-one had thought of it at that point, so it's gone forever and a whole load of corporate Vista upgrades were aborted because of the lack of IE6 compatibility. Whoops!

(Oh dear. If only someone hadn't integrated IE with the OS we wouldn't have all this difficulty: one could run multiple versions of IE and consequently each new version wouldn't need to retain the bugs of the previous version. IE would be smaller, faster, better; users could upgrade without fearing loss of functionality; with more upgrades we could author to the new stuff in IE8 more readily; and MS would have made more money on OS upgrades. Funny how these decisions come around to bite you, huh?)

Override intranet compatibility mode IE8

It is possible to override the compatibility mode in intranet.

For IIS, just add the below code to the web.config. Worked for me with IE9.

<system.webServer>
  <httpProtocol>
    <customHeaders>
      <clear />
      <add name="X-UA-Compatible" value="IE=edge" />
    </customHeaders>
  </httpProtocol>
</system.webServer>

Equivalent for Apache:

Header set X-UA-Compatible: IE=Edge

And for nginx:

add_header "X-UA-Compatible" "IE=Edge";

And for express.js:

res.set('X-UA-Compatible', 'IE=Edge')

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Forcing IE8 browser display a website in IE6 standards mode

Override intranet compatibility mode IE8

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