Question

Has anyone else noticed that IE9’s “standard” implementation of CSS box-shadow differs from other browsers? Whenever I use box-shadow and set a blur value, IE9 seems to render the blur at about half the value that Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera do.

Is there any way around this? And what exactly is the point of IE9 supporting box-shadow as a standard property if it doesn’t look the same as box-shadow in all the other browsers?

(Technically, Safari 5 still only supports -webkit-box-shadow and not the standard box-shadow property, but it also happens to render identically to box-shadow in Firefox 4, Chrome 11, and Opera 11. IE9 is the odd man out, despite supporting the same standard box-shadow syntax).

Answer 1

I also had this problem and solved it for myself with this script (using jQuery).

Please note this is experimental and I haven’t tested performance. Also: You have to run it again if you add elementss to your dom which has box-shadow. I guess that could be solved using a htc-file instead.

$(function(){
    fixBoxShadowBlur($('*'));
});

function fixBoxShadowBlur(jQueryObject){
    if($.browser.msie && $.browser.version.substr(0, 1) == '9'){
        jQueryObject.each(function(){
            boxShadow = $(this).css('boxShadow');
            if(boxShadow != 'none'){
                var bsArr = boxShadow.split(' ');
                bsBlur = parseInt(bsArr[2]) || 0;
                bsBlurMeasureType = bsArr[2].substr(("" + bsBlur).length);
                bsArr[2] = (bsBlur * 2) + bsBlurMeasureType;
                $(this).css('boxShadow', bsArr.join(' '));
            }
        });
    }
}