I’ve had some trouble with Internet Explorer recently.
I was making a new web tool which looked fine in all browsers. Except Internet Explorer, where it looked a bit squiffy.
Internet Explorer has “Compatibility View”. Compatibility View makes IE behave like the older versions of Internet Explorer, the ones before Microsoft started paying more attention to web standards.
It makes sense – there are a lot of websites out there that were written to render well on old versions of Internet Explorer, and Microsoft needed to make the move to standards compliance in a way that doesn’t break all of them.
The problem is, Compatibility View can be a little… insistent.
It kept turning on, even though I didn’t want it, even though my site worked fine in new shiny standards mode, and looked horribly broken in Compatibility View.
You can manually disable it, but I don’t want to have to make users do that. As the web developer, I want to be able to disable it – to tell IE that I want the site to be rendered in standards mode.
It was a bit fiddly. Here’s how I did it.
