 <p>I can see the dots fine in IE 9. Exact version as yours. Only difference in my code is a valid HTML5 doctype at the top.</p> <p>Without a valid doctype IE could be switching its rendering for your page to quirks mode, or a rendering mode for IE8/IE7 which would not handle the pseudo selectors like first-child or generated content.</p> <p>See your page <a href="http://browserling.com/encoder.html#uri=http://jsbin.com/ebasez/&amp;browser=explorer/9.0" rel="nofollow">here in browserling</a>.</p>