Use IE8 Compatibility Mode for Testing Web Page Rendering of IE6

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I am still running IE6 on my development PC because I use it to test the websites I'm developing.

I normally only test on IE6, assuming that IE6 is the lowest common denominator of IE family of browsers. If it renders well on IE6, it will be OK for IE7 and IE8. The other browser I use heavily for testing is Firefox 3.x. I assume these 2 family of browsers basically cover the bulk to the web surfers out there.

This is precisely the reason I have not upgraded to IE7. Now that IE8 can render web pages in Compatibility Mode, is it advisable to use IE8 for testing compatibility of websites with IE6?

I understand most people would advise using virtual machine. But it is kind of heavy just for viewing web pages.

Best Answer

Try out SuperPreview or the whole package (Expression Web announced at Mix) if you can..

SuperPreview is a new free standalone application from Microsoft (still in beta) which enables you to see how your websites will look across different versions of Internet Explorer making migration from IE6 to 7 and 8 much easier than before, without have to start up a Virtual Machine to run IE6, or have a separate computer dedicated to running IE6.

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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