Browsers

I have touched this subject already twice: first I I blogged about forcing site rendering to be done with Internet Explorer’s latest engine. Then I faced a situation where separate intranet zone (bad idea, Microsoft!) fallbacks to compatibility mode and does not respect the IE=edge meta tag as internet zone web sites do. Well… the saga isn’t over, as I faced this situation at work today. Again. I was going to put the IE=11 meta tag in place to force normal mode, but then I started to doubt how older IE’s (9, 10) would interpret the “11” tag. Short answer is: they don’t. Luckily you can specify many different modes, and the browser will pick the first one it supports. To apply this use either a meta tag in your page: ...

A while ago I blogged about forcing site rendering to be done with Internet Explorer’s latest engine. This feature is very well documented by Microsoft. Not that well documented is that adding the X-UA-Compatible header with value “IE=edge” does only half of the job: it overrides document mode, but not browser mode, and therefore you might end with situation like below - even if you carefully tried to avoid it by placing the meta tag (I know, I just did). ...

Recently I encountered a bug that only some users saw, and which did not reproduce locally on development environment. The setup was: An intranet page has an IFrame …that is dynamically changed to point to an attachment …which is served from MVC action returning FileContentResult This is a pretty common pattern to open files on browser without leaving the current page. And it worked like charm in all browsers, except on Internet Explorer 8 on testing environment, where IE just showed an error message that the address cannot be opened. IE 7 might be affected too, but I did not test on that. ...

New Internet Explorers have a necessary (?) but annoying feature called “Compatibility view”. I do not need that in my sites since I try to keep my HTML in good shape. Therefore on all projects I want to disable the feature since usually it breaks the layout. Disabling compatibility view can be done by adding a meta tag to HTML head: <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" /> …or, as it turns out, by adding a custom HTTP header with the same content. This HTTP-header-way is much better for me as I can include it in my default web.config changes I use on almost every web project. ...