Web Application Compatible with IE6 alone, How to run it on IE7

Question

I have a custom ASP.NET web application which runs fine on IE6 without any issues. However, if I launch it on IE7/IE8, it complains of compatibility issues and all of my text is all overlapped.

A colleague of mine ( Microsoft Link is as here - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968499 )sent these instructions.

 Click Start, click Run, type inetmgr.exe in the Open box, and then click OK. 

 Expand the server that you want, and then expand Web Sites. 

 Right-click the Web site, the folder, or the virtual directory that you want, and then click Properties. 

 On the HTTP Headers tab, click Add under Custom HTTP headers. 

 In the Custom header name box, type X-UA-Compatible. 

 In the Custom header valuebox, type IE=EmulateIE7. 

 Click OK two times

Now, he told that this is what needs to be done for making applications compatible with IE7 to run when I run an IE8 browser and just changing IE=EmulateIE7 to IE=EmulateIE6 should make the application compatible with IE6 to work on IE7 as well (I had my apprehensions, because I know that IE8 comes with a button which says compatible with IE6, but I have never seen a similar button in IE7).

Needless to say, it did not work!

Any thoughts on why it won't work this way for IE6?

Answer 1

IE 7, 8, Firefox, Chrome, are much more standard compliant. But if the app can only run on IE 6 and your machine already has IE 7 installed, then you can try running a Virtual Machine with a disk image with IE 6.

You can google VPC 2007 for Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007, and google vhd for the disk images.

VPC 2007 is officially for XP but the general consensus is it is also good for Vista.

VirtualBox is also a good alternative as a virtual pc. If you use Win 7, you can google virtual pc for the new info on the new Windows Virtual PC.

Answer 2

You're problably looking at some stylesheet issues rather than anything in the code behind of the application. The rendering of pages in IE6 is much different than IE7 or 8. I've run into the same issues on occassion and usually it's just a simple tweek of a defind style.

You can use the IE Developer Toolbar (which works in both IE7 and comes standard in 8) to see the layout of divs tables and etc along with the associated styles. Find the offending markup, tweek it in both browsers until you can get a consistant rendering across the diffrent browsers.

Good luck and hope this helps some.

Answer 3

Your problem is that there is no "EmulateIE6". The possible vaules are listed in HTTP-EQUIV Attribute | httpEquiv Property.

I would try setting it to "IE=5" and see if that helps.

And absolutely imperative that you update the browsers to something modern.