forcing IE8 browser display a website in IE6 standards mode

Question

there are document compatibility modes for all versions of IE browsers, but none for IE6. why is it like that? how can I make IE8/IE7 browser display a website in IE6 standards mode? other than changing the code to use conditional statements for different browsers, or different websites altogether, is there any easier or better solution for this issue?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325(VS.85).aspx

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" >

I did try using the IE5 mode, but didn't work. there are issues with page layout like width, height, scrollbars etc. (I haven't tested it extensively in IE8 yet). currently I am looking for a short term solution to release the app to the users with minimal changes for the updated browser and code will be changed later to make it fully compliant with IE8.

thanks, Rama

Answer 1

No, there is no IE6 Standards Mode, because Microsoft already abandoned IE6 Standards Mode with the IE7 release.

IE8 is built on — and is largely bug-compatible with — IE7. But IE7 Standards Mode was already not bug-compatible with IE6 Standards Mode. Microsoft aren't going to go crazy trying to dig out and re-implement IE6 bugs in IE8, when in their collective mind those bugs are already gone forever since developers surely must have updated their sites to work with IE7 already.

Of course in reality terrible webapps that rely on IE6 bugs do still exist, so a depressing number of corporates are still stuck with IE6, making the whole world worse for everyone. It would have been helpful to have introduced the EmulateIEn functionality in IE7 so that IE6 bug-compatibility could be preserved. However no-one had thought of it at that point, so it's gone forever and a whole load of corporate Vista upgrades were aborted because of the lack of IE6 compatibility. Whoops!

(Oh dear. If only someone hadn't integrated IE with the OS we wouldn't have all this difficulty: one could run multiple versions of IE and consequently each new version wouldn't need to retain the bugs of the previous version. IE would be smaller, faster, better; users could upgrade without fearing loss of functionality; with more upgrades we could author to the new stuff in IE8 more readily; and MS would have made more money on OS upgrades. Funny how these decisions come around to bite you, huh?)