If I remember right, it was done that way because Microsoft recognised that intranet pages are updated much less frequently (but still used frequently) than the frequently visited content on the internet. Intranets also tend to have more pages/sites with IE-specific behaviours. With this rule in play, it meant IE8+ would be able to work well on both sides of the fence out-of-the-box (important for corporate adoption).
The ideal solution is to simply declare your site HTML5-compatible and fix any issues that may cause. Your page/site will then work in IE and the other popular browsers. Otherwise you can add one of the meta tags to ensure a particular rendering mode always. For reference - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj676915(v=vs.85).aspx On 15 July 2013 18:03, Greg Keogh <[email protected]> wrote: > Who says everything works? I just noticed that when I ran my ASP.NET app in > the debugger the nth-child applied correctly. When I browsed in IE to the > live site on my web server none of the nth-child applied and it all looked > dreadful. After 30 minutes of looking in the F12 inspector and looking for > other weird IIS and environmental problems I ran a search and finally > stumbled across the post below in the noise. Like him, I was tricked into > thinking it was my fault. This is a classic example of how brittle things > are getting, with subtle and devious interdependencies between components. > > Greg > > For some reason I cannot fathom, IE9 defaults to compatibility mode for > looking at intranet sites, or an HTML page stored as a file on a PC. > Compatibility mode means 'render stuff like a dumb old browser'. This means > that when you're designing stuff for a website and you try to preview from > your favourite IDE in IE9, none of the CSS3 stuff works. You have to click > on Tools ->' compatibility view settings' in the IE9 menu and then unclick > the pesky checkbox that says 'display interanet sites in compatibility > view'. From then on the wretched browser works like any sane browser such as > Safari. Why did they do it? Heaven only knows, but it has taken me ages to > discover this simple fix due to the fact that I kept blaming my code.
