Difference between "Browser Mode" and "Document Mode" in Internet Explorer

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Alex Lawrence picture Alex Lawrence · Jul 12, 2011 · Viewed 64.9k times · Source

I´m really glad that I must no more use IETester since IE6 support was dropped in our company and IE9 has some quite cool developer tools. I can set "Browser Mode" and "Document Mode" but I can´t tell the difference. Does anyone know it? This post also didn´t help me out: IE8 browser mode vs document mode

Thanks

Answer

mhenry1384 picture mhenry1384 · Mar 5, 2012

Document Mode is what the browser uses to render the page: IE9, IE8, IE7 or Quirks. Browser Mode sets how the browser identifies itself to the web server and to JavaScript.

From a testing standpoint, it seems unnecessarily confusing that these are two separate options and you usually want to change both, for example, set the Browser mode to IE8 and the Document Mode to IE8 to get IE9 to pretend to be IE8.

There's also the Internet Exploer 9 Compatibility View option for Browser Mode. This seems to be the same as IE7 mode except the user-agent string also says "Trident/5.0" (Trident is the IE layout engine).

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