After spending much time hacking my webpage’s CSS to render well in IE6, there were decisions made that we would drop IE6 support and focus on the new IE8. I thought this was wonderful news since the page tested wonderfully in IE8.

Anyone who knows IE, knows that wasn’t the end of the story. As I relayed the test URL to my peers, who also had IE8, they were pinging me to let me know that it looks terrible in their browsers. I thought they were kidding until receiving screenshots.

After much research, it seemed liked IE8 was making the page appear in Compatibility View for my co-workers — which makes the page render like it was being viewed in an older version, ie. IE7. I clicked on the “Compatibility View” button on the browser toolbar and lo and behold, I saw what they were seeing. Ugh!

After spending countless hours trying to modify my css, I wondered if I could force IE8 to make users view the page according to IE8 standards only. I googled a bit and located a forums thread on the MSDN site.

Within this thread, it linked my to an article that allows developers to specify compatibility modes on a per-page basis by using a simple META tag, which looks like:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />
You can specify other browser versions from IE5 on up.

Now, it forces users to view the page in IE8 based only on IE8 standards. Whew!