Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Internet Explorer 11’s compatibility Mode Emulation

IE 11 has been driving me nuts. It decides to default to either IE5 ( WTF ) or IE 10 Compatibility IE 7 ( Also WTF ). Totally ready to throw it into the wall and just build 3 PCs for IE 8, 9 ,10 - I'm unofficially done supporting IE 7 - if we don't make a move to stop supporting it, people will never change. The web is about innovation and creating a better user experience. You will still get your backwards compatibility through HTML5 Shiv, but the need for IE7 special tags isn't worth the time invested.

Internet Explorer 11’s compatibility improvements let older websites just work in the latest standards mode, by default, without requiring emulation of the previous browser behavior. Because older websites are now just working, we’ve decided that Internet Explorer 10 document mode will be the last new document mode. Instead, developers will need to move to Internet Explorer 11’s Edge mode.
 
If you decide that you still need to emulate a previous browser environment, Internet Explorer 10 or older, you can change your server configuration to add X-UA-Compatible meta tags into the HTTP header. Changing this content value lets your site show up as it would appear in the selected version of Internet Explorer.

For example, if you wanted the content to look like it did in Internet Explorer 10, you'd specify the value of IE=10 in the X-UA-Compatible metadata. All of the other supported values are here:

 

Content value Meaning
IE=5
Renders using Internet Explorer 5 Quirks mode.
IE=7
Renders using Internet Explorer 7 standards mode.
IE=8
Renders using Internet Explorer 8 standards mode.
IE=9
Renders using Internet Explorer 9 standards mode.
IE=10
Renders using Internet Explorer 10 standards mode.
IE=Edge
Renders using the latest mode. This mode is the recommended for all websites.

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