CSS3 transform: rotate; in IE9

wilsonpage picture wilsonpage · Feb 1, 2011 · Viewed 115.8k times · Source

I have an element that needs to be vertical in a design I have done. I have got the css for this to work in all browsers except IE9. I used the filter for IE7 & IE8:

progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(rotation=3);

This however seems to render my element transparent in IE9 and the CSS3 'tranform' porperty doesn't seem to do anything!

Does anyone know anyway of rotating elements in IE9?

Really appreciate the help!

W.

Answer

Spudley picture Spudley · Feb 1, 2011

Standard CSS3 rotate should work in IE9, but I believe you need to give it a vendor prefix, like so:

  -ms-transform: rotate(10deg);

It is possible that it may not work in the beta version; if not, try downloading the current preview version (preview 7), which is a later revision that the beta. I don't have the beta version to test against, so I can't confirm whether it was in that version or not. The final release version is definitely slated to support it.

I can also confirm that the IE-specific filter property has been dropped in IE9.

[Edit]
People have asked for some further documentation. As they say, this is quite limited, but I did find this page: http://css3please.com/ which is useful for testing various CSS3 features in all browsers.

But testing the rotate feature on this page in IE9 preview caused it to crash fairly spectacularly.

However I have done some independant tests using -ms-transform:rotate() in IE9 in my own test pages, and it is working fine. So my conclusion is that the feature is implemented, but has got some bugs, possibly related to setting it dynamically.

Another useful reference point for which features are implemented in which browsers is www.canIuse.com -- see http://caniuse.com/#search=rotation

[EDIT]
Reviving this old answer because I recently found out about a hack called CSS Sandpaper which is relevant to the question and may make things easier.

The hack implements support for the standard CSS transform for for old versions of IE. So now you can add the following to your CSS:

-sand-transform: rotate(10deg);

...and have it work in IE 6/7/8, without having to use the filter syntax. (of course it still uses the filter syntax behind the scenes, but this makes it a lot easier to manage because it's using similar syntax to other browsers)