Frustrating: Can't force IE 8 into "Compatibility view"!

11,551

Solution 1

To quote the IEBlog:

“Browser Mode” affects the user agent string, version vector used when evaluating conditional comments, and the rendering mode.

It's detailed a bit more on http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd565624(VS.85).aspx.

As you can clearly see, you wouldn't be able to affect all of these things anyway: by the time you tell the browser to act like IE7, it's already acting as IE8.

Perhaps the real question is: Why does it matter that much to you what the browser mode is? The document mode is what you should be most concerned with - everything the browser mode changes as far as the rendering is concerned relate to stuff that is excluded/included but version checking, and users aren't going to look in the developer tools anyway, so they won't care.

Instead of wasting a lot of time getting it to look like pure compatibility mode in the developer tools, you should rather go and make sure that user agent string checking and conditional comments make it so that IE7 and IE8 get the same material to work with, and then leave the EmulateIE7 in.

EDIT:

The problem is your version checks, and as I promised below, I'm going to tell you where the problem is.

If you use the developer tools to debug the menu placement script, you can dig down and see that the execution path for get_x_position differs when the browser reports itself as IE7 or IE8: is_ie5up is set to true for IE7 mode, and false for IE8 mode. This results in very different values being returned.

At this point, we must go back to where this variable is set:

var is_ie5up    = (is_ie6up || (is_ie  && !is_ie3 && !is_ie4));

As you can see, this depends on the value of is_ie6up, so let's have a look at the surrounding code...

var is_ie8up    = (is_ie8   ||  is_ie9up);
var is_ie7up    = (is_ie7   ||  is_ie8up);
var is_ie7up    = (is_ie7);
var is_ie6up    = (is_ie6   || is_ie7);
var is_ie5up    = (is_ie6up || (is_ie  && !is_ie3 && !is_ie4));
var is_ie5_5up  = (is_ie6up || (is_ie && !is_ie3 && !is_ie4 && !is_ie5));

...do you spot the flaw (Hint: compare lines 2 and 4 of that snippet)?

That's right: is_ie6up is not set to true unless the browser is exactly IE6 or IE7. The proper line should of course read

var is_ie6up    = (is_ie6   || is_ie7up);

...but wait. That's no good either, because line 3 of the snippet changes is_ie7up to only be true if the browser is exactly IE7! So, you need to delete the overwriting of is_ie7up, and fix the setting of is_ie6up.

My guess is that you have the EXACT same problem on the other site: you've messed up the browser checks in much the same way.

Solution 2

You have set the meta tag correctly, but IE8 appears to use the previous rendering mode until you restart the browser.

To tell what your users are going to see:

  1. Click on the Document Mode in the developer toolbar and see which value is marked (Page Default).
  2. Restart IE8 and view your document - IE should now use the page default.

Solution 3

In my particular case my site would not render properly in Compat View. I finally learned that Browser Mode affects the User Agent string. My site style rules were based on User Agent so some styles were simply not getting applied in Compat view.

I was using

document.documentElement.setAttribute('data-useragent', navigator.userAgent);

so that later I could use css attribute selectors like

html[data-useragent*='MSIE 8.0'] p {}

I solved by adding:

html[data-useragent*='MSIE 7.0'] p {}

(not caring about true IE7 as true IE7 was not supported anyway)

In my experience there is nothing a developer can do to force IE8 from "Browser Mode: IE8 Compat View" into "Browser Mode: IE8". Again, I am are talking about BrowserModes NOT DocumentModes (which can be controlled by meta tags, response headers, etc).

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Maya Kathrine Andersen
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Maya Kathrine Andersen

Updated on August 06, 2022

Comments

  • Maya Kathrine Andersen
    Maya Kathrine Andersen over 1 year

    I've got two very different websites. Both of them have different errors when displayed in the "Internet explorer 8" browser mode!

    When clicking the "Compatibility view" button next to the address bar both of the sites look great. When I afterwards look at the "Browser mode" and "Document node" by using the built-in "Developer tools", I also notice the "Browser mode" is "IE8 Compat view" and the "Document mode" is "IE7 Standards". Just as I expect them to be.

    Then I want to force "Internet Explore 8" into the "Browser mode" : " IE8 Compat view", so that my users won't have to click the "Compatibility view" button next to the address bar to get what they really need to see.

    The only way I can think of doing this is by inserting a metatag below the title inside the header like this:

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
       "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
        <head>
            <title>Test</title>
            <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />
            <meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
            <link ... />
            <script ...></script>
        </head>
        <body>
            ...
        </body>
    </html>
    

    Then i reload the website and the "Compatibility view" button next to the address bar disapears. Just as expected. When I afterwards look at the "Browser mode" and "Document node" by using the built-in "Developer tools", I suddenly see something I really did NOT expect. I expected the "Browser mode" to be "IE8 Compat view" and the "Document node" to be "IE7 Standards", but the "Browser mode" is "IE8" and the "Document mode" is "IE7 Standards" and the websites suddenly have a new set of errors compared to when viewed in "Internet explorer 8" browser mode!

    It is very frustrating why can't I force the "IE8 Compat view" browser mode instead of the "Internet explore 7" or "Internet explore 8" browser modes?

  • Michael Madsen
    Michael Madsen over 14 years
    There's nothing really wrong with the doctype. There are plenty of reasons not to use XHTML, but that's an entirely different matter.
  • Maya Kathrine Andersen
    Maya Kathrine Andersen over 14 years
    "Why does it matter that much to you what the browser mode is?" It matters because i need to force/trigger the third browser mode "Internet Explore 8 Compatibility View" because ONLY in this mode my site looks right. EmulateIE7 triggers the "Internet explore 8" browser mode and the "IE7 Standards" document mode but in my case this is visually not the same as "Internet Explore 8 Compatibility View" and it looks wrong.
  • Maya Kathrine Andersen
    Maya Kathrine Andersen over 14 years
    The URL of one of the sites is: topotarget.com and at topotarget.com/index_test.dsp you can see the frontpage of the site with EmulateIE7 turned on. Hope this helps you to understand my problem.
  • Maya Kathrine Andersen
    Maya Kathrine Andersen over 14 years
    About the Developer tools: I only use it for debugging to prove my point in this question. So i understand what you say about that.
  • Maya Kathrine Andersen
    Maya Kathrine Andersen over 14 years
    And even if there was something wrong. Pressing the "Compatibility view" button in my case ignores this and shows the site perfectly. EmulateIE7 should really just to the same. That would be obvious.
  • Michael Madsen
    Michael Madsen over 14 years
    The problem is, as mentioned earlier, in your version checks. I'll edit my post to show exactly where it all goes wrong.