Difference between “Browser Mode” and “Document Mode” in Internet Explorer

Question

I am very glad that I should no longer use IETester, since IE6 support was dropped in our company, and IE9 has some pretty cool developer tools. I can set “Browser Mode” and “Document Mode”, but I can’t tell the difference. Does anyone know this? This post also didn't help me: IE8 browser mode and document mode

thank

Answer 1

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

From a testing point of view, it seems unnecessarily confusing that these are two separate parameters, and you usually want to change them, for example, set the browser mode to IE8 and document mode to IE8 so that IE9 looks like IE8.

There is also an option to view Internet Exploer 9 compatibility for browser mode. This is similar to IE7 mode, with the exception of the user agent string, it also says "Trident / 5.0" (Trident - IE Linking Engine).

Answer 2

This will in no way replace @ mhenry1384's answer, but there is also a very good explanation of the differences on MSDN blogs , more specifically this section:

and a bit more useful info :