Striking Snippet – IE7 Emulate

When you create a new design, you have to worry about compatibility for a whole bunch of browsers. There’s Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, and the list goes on and on. Each one of these browsers that you have to worry about takes time from your busy work schedule. Not to mention the fact that we now have yet ANOTHER version of Internet Explorer to worry about. It was bad enough when we had to throw away hours of our time just to get IE6 and IE7 looking acceptable. Now we have to worry about IE8, which frankly, is hardly an improvement over its predecessors when it comes to rendering the page. So, you have another browser to worry about, but you really don’t get any decent compatibility from this browser. Still hardly any CSS3 support, and it still manages to screw up the rendering of perfectly valid code.

You may have noticed that there is a built in button in IE8 that can render the site as it would in IE7. If a user finds that a page doesn’t look the way it’s supposed to, they can click this button, and WALLAH! It’ll render just as it should in Internet Explorer 7. The laughable fact that Microsoft’s method of fixing rendering problems is to display the page in a legacy browser aside, what if you could just put a line of code in your design that accomplished the same thing as this button. Well, luckily you can.

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

This is a real saving grace in some cases. It’s so simple, you put one line of code in the head of the page, and BAM! You have one less browser to worry about.