Currently I am working on a website which is using meta tag to render the page in IE9 mode [ BrowserMode: IE10, DocMode: IE9 Standards ]
I finally managed to fix this issue. Apparently if you set height and line-height to 0 and padding-top and padding-bottom to half of the height of your textbox, then this awesome 'X' will not be displayed anymore. Atleast this worked for me.
Here is the code pen: http://codepen.io/rjuyal/pen/iGKnI
Excerpt from code
.gen{
margin: 10px;
margin-top: 40px;
box-shadow: inset 1px 2p 0 rgba(200, 100,10, 0.2 );
font-size: 16px;
width: 400px;
line-height: 18px;
height: 41px;
fint-family: 'Lucida Grande' , 'Arial';
vertical-align: middle;
}
.ie10f{
height: 0px !important;
line-height: 0px !important;
padding-top: 22px !important;
padding-bottom: 22px !important;
}
You will see two text-boxes one with X another without it. Best part is, this hides X in IE10 ( no compatibility mode ) also.
P.S. You will have to manually change the DocMode to IE9 from developer tools.