Different appearance or behavior in Internet Explorer on local and production servers

AUTHOR: Peter Milchev

DATE POSTED: December 13, 2017

Problem 

In Internet Explorer, Telerik ASP.NET AJAX controls may have different appearance or behavior in development (local) and production environments.
 

Causes

In most cases, this unexpected behavior is caused by the fact that either the Compatibility view mode or Enterprise mode of the Internet Explorer browser are enabled. 

The Compatibility view mode is not supported (see the Browser Support page) because it triggers Internet Explorer 7 rendering. That is why you should have your IE browser run in Standards mode.
 

How to check if the Compatibility mode is disabled 

1. Check the Compatibility mode settings -> hit Alt -> expand Tools menu -> select Compatibility View Settings. They should be as in the screenshot below:

2. Check the HTML DOM documentMode Property. When the compatibility mode is enabled, the property value is 7 instead of 11.

The documentMode property can be checked in the browser console (F12) by passing it as a parameter to the alert() or console.log() method as demonstrated in the screenshot below. 

 
How to disable the Compatibility View mode

There are several ways to achieve that:

• from the Compatibility View Settings menu, unselect the "Display intranet sites in Compatibility View" checkbox

• speak with your local administrators so they enforce this checkbox rule as a group policy

• add an X-UA Compatible meta tag such as this one to your page:

HTML

You can also set it as an HTTP response header in the IIS settings as explained in Microsoft's article How to add a custom HTTP response header to a Web site that is hosted by IIS.

Another option to set the response header is through your web.config:



Please keep in mind that if the Compatibility mode is enabled by a Group Policy setting, the X-UA Compatible meta tag is ignored.
 

Disabling the Compatibility Mode did not fix the issue

Other possible causes of the incorrect behavior or appearance can be found in the Incorrect or distorted appearance section of the Skins troubleshooting article.