I have an MVC3 (razor) site published to IIS7 locally for testing purposes.
When I access the site via \"localhost\" it looks different from when I access using the
I had exactly similar issue in IE11, I used this code
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=11">
And now whether its localhost or my machine name, the page always rendered nicely.
Just wanted to add, that if you use HTML5 tags (nav, header etc.) IE8 will render different on localhost and remote host.
If you add:
<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<script>
document.createElement('header');
document.createElement('nav');
</script>
<![endif]-->
Then the IE8 will show the same on local and remote host.
The same css file is used for every page, and F12 in IE8 shows the correct css has been loaded.
Developer Tools should show that IE is not using the same "Browser Mode"/"Document Mode" between the two instances of the site, because that's the problem here. IE defaults to different modes depending on if you're using a machine name or not (amongst other things).
Adding this to your <head> should sort out the problem:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
I had a similar issue, where the sizes differed from the local development site to the one on the production server. Turned out that I forgot the zoom level to 90% when viewing the development version... This answer helped me realize that: https://superuser.com/questions/315448/different-font-size-between-localhost-and-remote-server-in-firefox