Opening site links new tabs causes IE8 to render them in quirks mode

Question

I having an issue with a ASP.NET site, and after searching for a couple of hours I could not find the answer.

I am working on a intranet site, and in both the production and the development enviroments, when I middle click a link to open in a new tab, that tab is rendered in quirks mode in IE8. Chrome opens fine, and if I followed the link without opening in a tab it opens in the normal mode.

There were a few tests that I did where I opened multiple tabs to the same page quickly, and every now and then the page would open fine.

I can't find any reason for this, the only thing that come to mind is maybe the server is not serving the pages correctly all the time when the page is opening in a tab, but I do not see how it would work sometimes, and not others.

Thanks,

Phil

P.S. I ensured that there is no blankspace above my DOCTYPE tag.

Answer 1

Turns out it was the LastPass Extension that was causing my problems. After I created a basically empty site and I was still having difficulties, I decided on a whim to goto Google and middle click one of there internal links. Sure enough it came up in Quirks mode. I went to another computer of mine, same thing. So I reset all settings on browsers, disabled all extensions and voila! links opened up fine.

I'll be writing a support request to LastPass, as I love this extention. Thanks for all your help!

Answer 2

You are on an inTRAnet site.

IE by default thinks you want this site to render in compatibility mode.

Ok, so there are a few approaches.

1. Turn off compatibility in IE for the site in question
2. Add a meta tag
3. Get real funky... Force "Internet Explorer 8" browser mode in intranet

In depth:

1. Alt > Tools Menu > Compatibility view settings > Uncheck: "Display intranet sites in Compatibility View".

2. Adding the following META tag as one of the first lines in the page's head section should do the trick.

   <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="IE=8">

The meta element can appear below a title element and other meta elements; however, it must precede other elements in the section.

---

Unfortunately there really isn't an easy answer to this question. I wish MSFT had gone standards by default across all sites in IE8 - and let sites (internal or external) opt out as desired.

For full-on scary OMG fun... check out this flow chart of how IE determines document/rendering mode: