HTML renders in IE8 Compat View, resulting in a giant mess

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15100136

Question

I have a page that works great on localhost, however when I push it out to our staging servers and load it up in IE8, it looks like garbage. Even more so than pages usually look in IE. I've traced this down to the fact that the page is rendering in compatibility mode. If I hit F12, I see:

enter image description here

If I go click on Browser Mode and manually change that to Internet Explorer 8, the page is reloaded in its beautiful mediocrity. However, I can't ask all the users to mess with the Developer Tools.

Is there a way to force the page to render in IE8 Standards Mode? My DOCTYPE looks like:

<!doctype html>

And the HTTP headers in the response are:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Encoding: gzip
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2013 21:56:29 GMT
Content-Length: 6249

Any ideas?

Update: My Compatibility View Settings are as follows, but note I can't ask users to change settings to use our site.

enter image description here

Was it helpful?

Solution 

 <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

Basically it (Internet explorer) is waiting for you to tell it that you've checked it with new versions of IE. Once you have you give it the seal of approval above and it will assume that the page is safe to render in with IE 8 mode.

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