How to revert IE8 to IE7

Submitted by steven.monetti on Mon, 11/29/2010 - 14:12

Introduction

Writing CSS for all browsers is difficult, especially when there are so many Internet Explorer versions out there. This tutorial will show you how to force IE8 to run in compatible mode, reverting its engine to IE7. Of course, by doing this, you will loose all of IE8 functionality, but there are not many improvements that is worth to debug for both.

The Code

Place this snippet of code right at the top of the <head>. It's very important that this line is before any other one (like CSS or JS includes).

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

After you do a hard-refresh, you will notice that the compatible mode icon no longer appears in your browser. That means that the snipped worked and your IE8 is not behaving like IE7.