Forcing Internet Explorer 9 to use standards document mode

How can I force Internet Explorer 9 to use standards document mode? I built a website and I'm finding that IE9 uses quirks mode to render the website pages. But I want to use standards mode for rendering.

 <!doctype html>
 <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Edge">

This makes each version of IE use its standard mode, so IE 9 will use IE 9 standards mode. (If instead you wanted newer versions of IE to also specifically use IE 9 standards mode, you would replace Edge by 9. But it is difficult to see why you would want that.)

For explanations, see http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/#ie8 (it looks rather messy, but that’s because IE is messy in its behaviors).

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />

The meta tag must be the first tag after the head tag or it will not work.

There is something very important about this thread that has been touched on but not fully explained. The HTML approach (adding a meta tag in the head) only works consistently on raw HTML or very basic server pages. My site is a very complex server-driven site with master pages, themeing and a lot of third party controls, etc. What I found was that some of these controls were programmatically adding their own tags to the final HTML which were being pushed to the browser at the beginning of the head tag. This effectively rendered the HTML meta tags useless.

Well, if you can't beat them, join them. The only solution that worked for me is to do exactly the same thing in the pre-render event of my master pages as such:

Private Sub Page_PreRender(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.PreRender
    Dim MetaTag As HtmlMeta = New HtmlMeta()
    MetaTag.Attributes("http-equiv") = "Content-Type"
    MetaTag.Attributes("content") = "text/html; charset=utf-8;"
    Page.Header.Controls.AddAt(0, MetaTag)

    MetaTag = New HtmlMeta()
    MetaTag.Attributes("http-equiv") = "X-UA-Compatible"
    MetaTag.Attributes("content") = "IE=9,chrome=1"
    Page.Header.Controls.AddAt(0, MetaTag)
End Sub

This is VB.NET but the same approach would work for any server-side technology. As long as you make sure it's the last thing that gets done right before the page is rendered.

put a doctype as the first line of your html document

<!DOCTYPE html>

you can find detailed explanation about internet explorer document compatibility here: Defining Document Compatibility

To prevent quirks mode, define a 'doctype' like :

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

To make IE render the page in IE9 document mode :

<meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="IE=9">

Please note that "IE=edge" will make IE render the page with the most recent document mode, rather than IE9 document mode.

Forcing Internet Explorer 9 to use standards document mode

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