Emulate legacy IE in IE8+ for SharePoint sites

Starting with Internet Explorer 8, all pages are rendered in the strictest manner possible, according to the DOCTYPE. This causes problems with legacy web sites, especially sites running SharePoint.

There is a workaround, however. Since IE8, IE supports legacy rendering modes and we can tell it to emulate previous versions of IE rendering with a META tag:

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

Another alternative is to add an HTTP Header in IIS for each site:

X-UA-Compatible: IE=EmulateIE7

Or you can also add this to web.config:

<system.webServer>
  <httpProtocol>
    <customHeaders>
      <clear />
      <add name="X-UA-Compatible" value="IE=EmulateIE7" />
    </customHeaders>
  </httpProtocol>
</system.webServer>

In IE8 you can emulate IE7, in IE9 you can emulate IE8 and IE7, etc.

You can read more about this in Introducing IE=EmulateIE7 and Specifying legacy document modes.

Nuno Freitas
Posted by Nuno Freitas on June 24, 2013

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