why compatibility mode for intranet sites

Question

I\'m a Mac person, web designer, trying to understand \"Display intranet sites in compatibility mode\" option with IE 11

I have client, an architecture firm, that used

Answer 1

IE makes assumption about displaying intranet sites (http://someInternalSite/ vs. http://someInternalSite.myCompany.org). That assumption is that intranet sites work best in compatibility mode.

It makes the so called "smart" judgement by looking at it this way: Since the website is hosted in internal servers - there must be some corporate legacy applications developed on older versions of IE. And since IE is not perfect at maintaining proper fallbacks to older versions - thus its good to turn on the compatibility mode for the rescue.

To fix it either access the site with FQDN or uncheck a checkbox in “Compatibility View Settings”

More info of the IE "Smart Defaults" on this blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2009/06/17/compatibility-view-and-smart-defaults.aspx