Forcing IE7 mode in IE8 – peace on earth.

I was just asked to fix a few problems on a site I made pre IE8, and was expecting a few hours of hitting F5 and chaning padding values, when I noticed the little broken page icon in IE8, I’d never noticed it before, so clicked it. Bam. The pages all looked fine!
Turns out this helpful little button forces IE8 to render the page in IE7 mode. After a quick Google I found you could turn this on automatically with a simple meta tag in the head of you HTML page;

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

Make sure it’s the first thing in the or it may not work, it certainly has to be before all you CSS stuff.
I assume this isn’t the most “correct” way of doing things, and all sites I start nowadays are IE8 happy out of the box, but this certainly saves a helluvalot of time, and save me wearing out my F5 key.

1. Dec 15, 2009 16:13 Mike G. said:

   You’re a genius-you’ve just saved me HOURS of time.

Do you have to say something?

Your name (required):

e-mail address (required) (not published!):

Website:

Your comment: