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I had struggled with this issue and wanted to help provide a unique solution and insight.
Certain AJAX based frameworks will inject javascripts and stylesheets at the beginning of the <head> and doing this seems to prevent the well-established meta tag solution from working properly. In this case I found that directly injecting into the HTTP response header, much like Andras Csehi's answer will solve the problem.
For those of us using Java Servlets however, a good way to solve this is to use a ServletFilter.
public class EmulateFilter implements Filter {
@Override
public void destroy() {
}
@Override
public void doFilter(ServletRequest arg0, ServletResponse arg1,
FilterChain arg2) throws IOException, ServletException {
HttpServletResponse response = ((HttpServletResponse)arg1);
response.addHeader("X-UA-Compatible", "IE=8");
arg2.doFilter(arg0, arg1);
}
@Override
public void init(FilterConfig arg0) throws ServletException {
}
}
If you want your Web site to force IE 8 standards mode, then use this metatag along with a valid DOCTYPE:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE8" />
Note the "EmulateIE8" value rather than the plain "IE8".
According to IE devs, this should, "Display Standards DOCTYPEs in IE8 Standards mode; Display Quirks DOCTYPEs in Quirks mode. Use this tag to override compatibility view on client machines and force Standards to IE8 Standards."
more info on this IE blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2008/08/27/introducing-compatibility-view.aspx
Had the same problem. It worked by using
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE9" />
Add this inside your pages head tag (targeting the IE version you want):
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />
Note, this will NOT change the fact that the browser says its in compatibility mode (called the browser mode), but the page will render in IE8 standards mode. If its STILL not rendering how you wish, its probably because you have javascript that is erroneously checking the I.E. version. See the following blog post to determine which property you should be keying off of because even if you set the meta X-UA-Compatible tag, the user agent string will still say MSIE 7.0.
In my case, for the fix I had to add a check for IE7 Compatibility mode. I did so using a simple javascript code:
//IE8 and later will have the word 'trident' in its user agent string.
if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Trident")>-1) { //do something }