What does <meta http-equiv=“X-UA-Compatible” content=“IE=edge”> do?

What's the difference if one web page starts with <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"> and If the page starts with <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head>  If there is no difference, I suppose I can just ignore the X-UA-Compatible meta header, since I just want it to be rendered in most standard mode in all IE versions.

html html5 browser internet-explorer x-ua-compatible

30th Oct 2020, 1:53 AM

Rishbabh Sharma

1 Answer

+ 4

IE before version 11 will not necessarily use edge mode if you don't specify it. So if you want to support older versions of IE the meta tag is necessary. In IE you can also add intranet sites to the "compatibility view" list which will render them in quirksmode, X-UA-Compatible overrides this setting. I learned that the hard way because a company I was in changed compatibility view settings for all users, via group policy. It's one of those things that you just put there for ease of mind. X-UA-Compatible probably does not matter in 2020 but it's easy enough to add, for those 0.003% of edge cases.

30th Oct 2020, 5:39 AM

Schindlabua