Overriding the Internet Explorer 8 Browser Mode in an intranet environment

2
votes

I am working on an intranet website within a corporate company where there is the Internet Explorer 8 (running on Windows XP, so cannot upgrade to IE9) used as a standard (and the only one) browser and I am dealing with the Compatibility View Mode feature. The website is based on ASP.NET 2.0 and the web server is Windows Server 2003 with IIS6.

It is not possible to switch to any other browser because some other critical third party web based applications require Internet Explorer (and ActiveX) to run properly.

I would like to ask whether there is a way how to (programmaticaly, using a http header ...) override the Internet Explorer's browser mode in case the Compatibility View Mode is turned on for Intranet websites by default or, in other words, how to force the Internet Explorer to use the IE8 Browser Mode rather than the IE8 Compatibility Mode.

I have tried to add the X-UA-Compatible http header set to IE=Edge (or IE=8) in the IIS configuration but it only affects the Document Mode, never the Browser Mode.

Thanks for any help.

1
internet-explorer-8iis-6intranetie8-compatibility-modeie8-browser-mode

1 Answers

0
votes

Browser mode refers to the user-agent string and, IIRC, it controls the UA string that's sent to a server during HTTP negotiation. The only documented way to control that is to use the F12 developer tools.

You may want to look at Enterprise Mode[1] (EMIE), supported for Win 7 and later. When EMIE is enabled for IE, IE11 behaves and acts like IE8. This includes the UA String.

You are correct, x-ua-compatible controls only the document mode. There was a feature control key (FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATION [2]) that might've helped, but it's unclear whether that's still supported in current versions of IE. (See the Extensibility Improvements link on that page for technical details.)

Hope this helps...

References:

[1] - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn640687

[2] - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/ee330730(v=vs.85).aspx#browser_emulation