Competing X-UA-Compatible meta tags

Question

One of our websites is run by an offsite company. We noticed that they had the following meta tag by default on all of our pages:

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

When we asked them to update this, they added the meta tag

    <meta content="IE=edge,chrome=1" http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" />

beneath it. When I pull this up in IE9 or IE10 it still defaults to IE8. (I did check to see if this was a setting in my version of IE, and other websites display correctly.) My intuition is that the meta tags are competing. Does anyone know if this would be the case?

Additionally, if we have them remove the IE=8 tag, will it render correctly?

Answer 1

Yeah, there's no reason to have both tags. Only one will be used and if it's the first one then the second is pointless. The only reason for the IE=8 one to be there in the first place would be if there were issues in IE9 and 10.

It's not necessarily bad to have the IE=8 one in there. If your site works and there are no speed issues in IE then it could be more trouble that it's worth to have them solve the problems that caused them to use IE8 compatibility mode.