How to override compatibility mode for intranet site when “Display intranet sites in Compatibility View” is checked?

Based on some research in internet I found that we can use HTML meta tag:

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

to force IE to use highest supported document mode of the browser. Note: more about X-UA-Compatible you can find in MSDN documentation.

However, based on discussion in group Internet Explorer Dev Center looks like it’s better to send header X-UA-Compatible in server response. Cite:

The only way I found to override the “Display intranet sites in Compatibility View” setting was by setting the X-UA-Compatible host header for the particular site in IIS to “IE=8“. This overrides the browser setting–but the meta tag does not for some reason.

Source: Ben Ramey

Also, while the X-UA-Compatible is a standard meta key, the value IE=edge is not, and therefore the W3C HTML validator will give you an error. So, to fix it just send header from server with X-UA-Compatible.

Example configuration for IIS:

<system.webServer>
    <httpProtocol>
      <customHeaders>
        <add name="X-UA-Compatible" value="IE=edge" />
      </customHeaders>
    </httpProtocol>
</system.webServer>

For Apache configuration take a look at Apache httpd configuration for IE7 standard mode rendering in IE8 article. It says about IE8, but it’s still applicable for IE11 as well.