Question

I am having a big issue trying to disable IE’s Compatibility mode.

After much head banging, I have traced the issue down to whether the site is been served as Apache’s default config, or as a virtual host.

I know this to be the case as when I access the site with the ‘localhost’ domain, everything is fine. As soon as I access the very same page via a domain configured in a virtual host – the site renders in Compatibility mode.

Can anyone please shed any light on this crazy issue???

Serving the site as the default host isn’t an option.

• Dean

Answer 1

Ah-ha!

From here (emphasis mine):

A large number of line-of-business websites are Internet Explorer 7 capable today. In order to preserve compatibility, Internet Explorer 8 ships with smart defaults based on zone evaluation. In the default state, all sites on the public internet display in Internet Explorer 8 Standards mode (Compatibility View off) and all intranet websites display in Internet Explorer 7 Standards mode (Compatibility View on).

…

If you navigate to sites on your local intranet like http://myPortal and http://sharepoint/sites/mySite, Internet Explorer 8 identifies itself with a User Agent string of ‘7’, Version Vector of ‘7’, and displays webpages that trigger standards mode in Internet Explorer 7 Standards mode. This combination allows webpages that worked correctly in Internet Explorer 7 to continue to do so in IE8.

I’m not commenting this. I’m sure this has some good real-world reasons, but I still have the urge to hit my head on the desk.