Why does my page work in IE9's IE7 mode, but not in IE7 itself?

Question

I recently went live with our new home page, after heavily testing it in each of IE9\'s browser and document modes (not just compatibility mode, but actual IE7 and IE8

Answer 1

I would recommend using the HTML5BoilerPlate ( http://html5boilerplate.com/ ) as a source of inspiration and guidance. I am in the exact same situation: Web Developer for a university and have to write a main site redesign.

I think you already did this, based on your source. Are you using the latest version? Perhaps there have been some updates to the HTML5BoilerPlate template that would address this.

I found a co-worker with the real IE7 installed and sure enough, your page looks bad. I then checked out my mockup in the real IE7 and it looks OK (I consider my very lucky now).

My mockup is also based on the HTML5BoilerPlate template.

Another suggestion is to try commenting-out blocks of code and try to isolate the cause of the problem.

I think you slideshow is the cause of the problem (or at least the symptom). I have had to re-implement my slideshow content using 3 different plugins. Currently, I have settled on the jQuery cycle plugin for that kind of content: http://jquery.malsup.com/cycle/

I really want to know the cause the of the problem, too. The site looks great, by the way, when rendered the way it is supposed to look. Good job!

---

Checkout this MSDN blog posting: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2009/03/12/site-compatibility-and-ie8.aspx