I've posted this comment on a seperate StackOverflow thread, but thought it was worth repeating here:
For our in-house ASP.Net app, adding the "X-UA-Compatible" tag on the web page, in the web.config or in the code-behind made absolutely no difference.
The only thing that worked for us was to manually turn off this setting in IE8:
(Sigh.)
This problem only seems to happen with IE8 & IE9 on intranet sites. External websites will work fine and use the correct version of IE8/9, but for internal websites, IE9 suddenly decides it's actually IE7, and doesn't have any HTML 5 support.
No, I don't quite understand this logic either.
My reluctant solution has been to test whether the browser has HTML 5 support (by creating a canvas, and testing if it's valid), and displaying this message to the user if it's not valid:
It's not particularly user-friendly, but getting the user to turn off this annoying setting seems to be the only way to let them run in-house HTML 5 web apps properly.
Or get the users to use Chrome. ;-)