Unable to emulate as IE7 in IE10 browser

Question

I used the following line to emulate IE10 as IE7 in Windows 8 professional machine.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" /> 

If I use this piece of code in a sample html, it worked fine and emulated as IE7. I observed value 7 using alert box to print : " document.documentMode ".

But, if I use the same code in my project, it emulates as IE10 only. The value 10 has displayed in alert box.

There are no more meta tags except this. This code is working fine with IE7, IE8, IE9 which are emulated as IE7 only. Can any one tell me in which case it would fail to emulate.

Answer 1

I often have to test projects in IE 7–10 and have found the emulation meta tags to be very inconsistent.

I recommend downloading a free VM for each version of IE (7, 8, 9, and 10) from Microsoft's new modern.IE website. You can simply open each VM in Parallels, VMware, or VirtualBox and you'll immediately be in a clean version of Windows 7 with the appropriate version of IE installed for you.

Download VMs for any version of IE you require here: http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools#downloads

Bonus: They even give you a simple cURL command to download each VM. In your case, you can download a VM of Windows Vista with IE 7 installed with the following command:

curl -O "https://az412801.vo.msecnd.net/vhd/IEKitV1_Final/VMWare_Fusion/IE7_Vista/IE7.Vista.For.MacVMware.part0{1.sfx,2.rar,3.rar,4.rar}"