Force IE out of Compatibility Mode

Question

I've read the following MSDN page:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-en/library/cc817574.aspx

And quite a few questions on SO, but I'm not entirely convinced I have the answer I want.

We are currently dealing with an issue where our client is upgrading all there computers from IE6 to IE8, but via group policy they force IE8 to run in compatibility mode.

I assume this is done so legacy internal applications continue to work. This however breaks our website since we aren't supporting IE7 100%

Is using the Meta tag:

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

Going to override their compatibility mode setting and force our site to use IE8, proving their group policy is not set to 8888?

8888: Pages are always displayed in IE8mode, regardless of the directive. (This bypasses the exceptions listed earlier.)

Answer 1

I normally do it in the http headers, so the browser knows it before actually seeing the html. That makes sure it's in the right mode.

On IIS, that's in the web.config file:

<httpProtocol>
  <customHeaders>
    <clear />
    <add name="X-UA-Compatible" value="IE=edge" />
  </customHeaders>
</httpProtocol>

on apache, I don't know. But googling X-UA-Compatible IE=edge should help.

you could do IE=IE9, too, to fix a specific version.

I don't know if that overrides the group policy, to be honest. But it worked in any scenario that I had to force IE to a specific version, including inside a corporate network on localhost.