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Troubleshooting Disqus in Internet Explorer 8/9/10
Troubleshooting Disqus in Internet Explorer 8/9/10
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Written by Disqus
Updated over a week ago

Disqus officially supports Internet Explorer version 10, though it may also work in Internet Explorer versions 8 and 9. If Disqus is loading inconsistently or not at all for you in these browsers, there are several factors that may cause this:

Compatibility View

When Internet Explorer's Compatibility View is enabled, you may see the following message in place of the normal Disqus commenting area:

"Your browser is not currently supported in Disqus. Please use a modern browser."

This is because Internet Explorer is loading the page using an older, "compatible" version of Internet Explorer's rendering engine.

To fix this, turn off Compatibility View. See Microsoft's Compatibility View help page for steps on how to do this.

Web developers also have the option of setting their own document mode using the following:

meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8"

Quirks Mode

Internet Explorer will render in Quirks Mode when the <!DOCTYPE> is either missing or doesn't comply with standards. This may result in strange Disqus loading behavior; for example, Disqus may load wider than the page, forcing a horizontal scrollbar.

To check if Internet Explorer is using Quirks Mode, open the development tools (press F12) > check the Document Mode. If it says Quirks, you can try changing this to IE8 or IE9 Standards to view the page normally.

For Publishers

Pages being loaded in Quirks Mode can be fixed by using a standard <!DOCTYPE>. The most common causes include:

No doctype present

A doctype is required to comply with rendering standards. Not including one will cause Internet Explorer to render in Quirks Mode. You can find a list of standard doctypes here.

Whitespace or other characters before the doctype

No characters (including whitespace) can precede the doctype. Make sure it's the very first thing listed on the page.

Missing public identifier

The public identifier is the URL that comes after the doctype, and is required to comply with standards.

This doctype is incorrect because it's missing the identifier URL:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> 

This would be the correct version with the identifier URL:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

IE7 Emulation

Some websites force Internet Explorer to load emulating an older version of Internet Explorer. You can check by opening the development tools (Press F12) and checking the Document Mode. If it says Internet Explorer 7 Standards, you can switch this to Internet Explorer 8/9 Standards to load Disqus properly.

For Publishers

The most common reason the page would load in IE7 standards is because of the EmulateIE7 meta tags. Look in your page source and find an HTML tag similar to this:

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

You can either remove this or change it to use the latest version of IE available:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=9; IE=8; IE=7; IE=EDGE; chrome=1" />
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