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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

Community
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Alex Lawrence
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    possible duplicate of [IE8 browser mode vs document mode](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2950598/ie8-browser-mode-vs-document-mode) – EricLaw Jul 12 '11 at 13:21
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    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd565628(VS.85).aspx#bdmodes has some more info too. – EricLaw Jul 12 '11 at 13:23

2 Answers2

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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).

mhenry1384
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    Thanks! I read that already a while ago but I forgot about the question here. As far as I know Document Mode determines the layout and the JavaScript engine and Browser Mode determines the User Agent sent to the server. In my specific case it is important to only test with the same values for Document and Browser Mode. – Alex Lawrence Mar 22 '12 at 18:01
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    According to the Microsoft document mentioned in @EricLaw’s comment, the Browser Mode affects the user agent string sent to servers and “Version vector: The value used when evaluating conditional comments” (e.g. whether ` – Jukka K. Korpela Feb 26 '13 at 11:15
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    dont depend on the Browser mode of the developer tools. I d rather use virtual machines to test different IE since that tool totally sucks. It does not reflect 100% similar to a real IE (sorry, I m still pissed off because of a bug from my product about the IE compatibility, it works on the local settings but it does not work on the real browser :( ) – Thai Tran May 02 '13 at 07:10
  • your first paragraph is the best explanation I ever heard on this subject. – Hagai L Apr 24 '14 at 08:16
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In no way this will replace @mhenry1384's answer, but there is also a very good explanation of the differences on the MSDN blogs, more specifically this section:

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and here a little more useful info:

enter image description here

Gaia
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