Forcing IE8 browser display a website in IE6 standards mode?

No, there is no IE6 Standards Mode, because Microsoft already abandoned IE6 Standards Mode with the IE7 release.

No, there is no IE6 Standards Mode, because Microsoft already abandoned IE6 Standards Mode with the IE7 release. IE8 is built on — and is largely bug-compatible with — IE7. But IE7 Standards Mode was already not bug-compatible with IE6 Standards Mode.

Microsoft aren't going to go crazy trying to dig out and re-implement IE6 bugs in IE8, when in their collective mind those bugs are already gone forever since developers surely must have updated their sites to work with IE7 already. Of course in reality terrible webapps that rely on IE6 bugs do still exist, so a depressing number of corporates are still stuck with IE6, making the whole world worse for everyone. It would have been helpful to have introduced the EmulateIEn functionality in IE7 so that IE6 bug-compatibility could be preserved.

However no-one had thought of it at that point, so it's gone forever and a whole load of corporate Vista upgrades were aborted because of the lack of IE6 compatibility. Whoops! (Oh dear.

If only someone hadn't integrated IE with the OS we wouldn't have all this difficulty: one could run multiple versions of IE and consequently each new version wouldn't need to retain the bugs of the previous version. IE would be smaller, faster, better; users could upgrade without fearing loss of functionality; with more upgrades we could author to the new stuff in IE8 more readily; and MS would have made more money on OS upgrades. Funny how these decisions come around to bite you, huh?).

Thanks. Other comments were also useful – RKP Jan 27 '10 at 16:39.

Only the IE team can really answer why they no longer support the seriously buggy implementation of IE6 standards mode. One can only speculate "because its seriously buggy". I'm afraid if you want to support IE6 you will have to jump through all the painful hoops that everyone else has to.

Commercially you may have to, but if you don't I would recommend you simply don't.

There's no need for an specific setting for IE6, once the rendered for IE6 is the same of IE5.5, so setting up for IE5 you automatically set for IE6. The difference between IE5 and IE6 is the implementation of better JavaScript (if I recall correctly) but no alteration was made in the rendering engine. The first update in the rendering engine was in IE7, and a major overhaul was made in IE8.

1 This isn't quite right. IE6 in Quirks Mode is very close to IE5.5, but IE6 is also the version that introduced Standards Mode, which fixes many bugs and is closer to IE7 than IE5. – bobince Jan 18 '10 at 11:53.

The solution is quite simple: Make the code compliant to IE8 before releasing to the user.

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