IE8 and IE7 Compatibility Mode

There are still many people who do not care whether they are using the Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari or Opera. They simply just want access to the internet. As designers and developers, we have to understand this and make sure sites look correct in all browsers.

IE8 was released on March 19, 2009 and was touted as a Standards Based Browser. This excited and scared the web design industry. For so long, IE had ignored standards making it almost impossible to develop a site that looked the same in IE as it did in other browsers.

If your website is displaying correctly in IE7, but now you see that your site doesn’t look right in IE8 there is the ability for the end user to switch to compatibility mode. This means that your site will render like it did when using IE7. The code to use would be:

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

What if you don’t want to Emulate IE7 and want to force the site to display using IE8? No problem.

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

Remember, to put this meta tag before any other in your head section of the document. The meta tag “http-equv” is an HTML 3.2 property. Microsoft has an article in their MSDN about this very issue. Although one thing I would recommend is to use lowercase tags.

One final note: While we do have to develop for all browsers, we don’t have to use them all. For us, firefox is best. It allows us the speed, tools, and security that we like. If you are not using Firefox, please download it and give it a try.