[internet-explorer] Force IE8 Into IE7 Compatiblity Mode

Is there a way to force IE8 into IE7 compatibility mode using .NET or Javascript?

I might have found it now. http://blog.lroot.com/articles/the-ie7-compatibility-tag-force-ie8-to-use-the-ie7-rendering-mode/

The site says adding this meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7">

or adding this to .htaccess

Header set X-UA-Compatible: IE=EmulateIE7 

There is an HTTP header you can set that will force IE8 to use IE7-compatibility mode.

You can do it in the web.config

    <httpProtocol>
        <customHeaders>
            <add name="X-UA-Compatible" value="IE=7"/>
        </customHeaders>
    </httpProtocol>

I have better results with this over the above solutions. Not sure why this wasn't given as a solution. :)

my code has this tag

meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

is there a way where i can skip this tag and yet layouts get displayed well and fine using that tag the display will work upto IE 7 but i want to run it wel in further versions...

This can be done in IIS: http://weblogs.asp.net/joelvarty/archive/2009/03/23/force-ie7-compatibility-mode-in-ie8-with-iis-settings.aspx

Read the comments as well: Wednesday, April 01, 2009 8:57 AM by John Moore

A quick follow-up. This worked great for my site as long as I use the IE=EmulateIE7 value. Trying to use the IE=7 resulted in my site essentially hanging when run on IE8.

one more if you want to switch IE 8 page render in IE 8 standard mode

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=100" /> <!-- IE8 mode -->

A note to this:

IE 8.0s emulation only promises to display the page the same. There are subtle differences that might cause functionality to break. I recently had a problem with just that. Where IE 7.0 uses a javascript wrapper-function called "anonymous()" in IE 8.0 the wrapper was named differently.

So do not expect things like JavaScript to "just work", because you turn on emulation.

its even simpler than that. Using HTML you can just add this metatag to your page (first thing on the page):

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

If you wanted to do it using.net, you just have to send your http request with that meta information in the header. This would require a page refresh to work though.

Also, you can look at a similar question here: Compatibility Mode in IE8 using VBScript