Internet Explorer Compatibility View and the ExpressionEngine Control Panel

We recently had a client contact us about mysteriously disappearing formatting buttons in their ExpressionEngine control panel. We had completed an upgrade from 1.x to 2.5-ish and they were complaining that the html formatting buttons were disappearing and reappearing “at random” for certain channels. Well we all know that true randomness is hard to achieve so we started trouble shooting.

First we identified the browser as Internet Explorer 9. Next we logged in as the affected user and began to attempt to duplicate. No luck; those pesky formatting buttons showed up every time. We requested screen shots from our client. “Odd” we thought, “none of our CSS3 rounded corner styles are rendering. Must be that daggone compatibility setting.” But wait! The screenshot didn’t show the little broken document icon in the URL bar… what the hey?

That began our exploration of Internet Explorer 9’s settings. Depending upon the install, the old menu bar may not display by default… there’s a gear cog icon that shows as “Tools” in the upper right hand corner of the IE interface. Unfortunately the compatibility view settings don’t live there. You have to make the menu bar visible (alt key), then choose the compatibility view settings from THAT tools link. The issue was that the client’s network was configured such that it considered their website as an intranet site. So the default setting “View all intranet sites in Compatibility View” hosed some of the javascript goodness present in the EE control panel.

In the end, the fix was easy. It was finding the setting that was a little tricky.