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Ive seen a lot of talk about box-shadow in IE9 - but when i try it out it does not work! (of course im not suprised ... sigh). Am i mistaken that these thing are supposed to work in ie9 or is mys css wrong or is there a mode in ie9? Heres the CSS code im using:

.jW{position:absolute;border-radius:8px;box-shadow:4px 4px 24px 4px #000000}

Same goes for border-radius. Ive even opened up CSS3 sites that have these attributes like http://css3please.com/ and they dont work in IE9 either. Actually: bugger IE!

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check this example may that's help stackoverflow.com/questions/5617455/… –  sandeep Sep 1 '11 at 10:02
Make a minimal test case. Save you page and keep deleting style rules and parts of the page until you get to a simple example you can post, to work out what elements are interacting badly. –  Nicholas Wilson Sep 1 '11 at 10:16

6 Answers 6

OK - found the problem. Firstly thanks to sandeep for refering me to part of the problem. IE9 does not require any doctype for these styles to work. Whats causing the problem is "border-collapse:collapse" on tables - use cellspacing=0 then it works - still: bugger IE

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It should work (as far as I know - will run some simulations later). In the meantime your can check out CSS3 PIE (http://css3pie.com) that enhances IE rendering of CSS3 properties (not really IE's rendering, but close enough).

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this looks interesting, but it doesn't work in IE9 so... –  Gatekeeper Sep 1 '11 at 10:35
i doing a year zero with IE - im not supporting IE versions less than 9 –  Johnny Darvall Sep 3 '11 at 9:21

According to CanIUse.com, IE9 does support box-shadow and border-radius.

I haven't tried it with box-shadow, but I can definitely vouch for it working with border-radius

The most likely reason for it not working is that you're actually running in IE8 compatibility mode (or even IE7 compat). This will make IE9 drop all the new features and pretend to be the older version.

The quickest way to check if this is the problem is to hit F12 to open the IE developer tools window. This will show the rendering mode in the top right hand corner.

If it is rendering in compatibility mode, then you can change it here. You can also add a meta tag to the top of your code to force your site to use the latest IE mode. If it's happening for every site then you may need to change your browser settings.

Hope that helps.

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Ooops - im sorry but i wasnt entirely correct in my testing - it seems that doctype is essential for these things to work. But then everything else breaks down. I think next time ill write for IE first then the others - hey mabe thats microsofts strategy all along!

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Use this - it seems best, with not TOO much css disruption: <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" value="IE=9"> –  Johnny Darvall Sep 3 '11 at 10:10

I also was experiencing the problem where the box shadow was not being displayed in IE9. In my case, IE9 was rendering the document in compatibility mode, even though I had a valid DOCTYPE. I was debugging locally, and IE has a setting "Display intranet sites in Compatibility View" which was enabled, apparently by default. After disabling this, everything works as expected. This can be found under Tools -> Compatibility View settings.

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The reason box shadow does not work is that IE automatically runs in quirks mode which does not support this.

If you set internet explorer to run in standards mode it will display box-shadow correctly

you can force ie to run in standards mode by following this post: How do I force Internet Explorer to render in Standards Mode and NOT in Quirks?

If you can't edit http headers then use: <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">

(or <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" /> if you're using XHTML)

It should work fine if you do this

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