Fix SVGs not scaling in IE9, IE10, and IE11

A.markdown

Fix SVG in <img> tags not scaling in IE9, IE10, IE11

IE9, IE10, and IE11 don't properly scale SVG files added with img tags when viewBox, width and height attributes are specified. View this codepen on the different browsers.

Image heights will not scale when the images are inside containers narrower than image widths. This can be resolved in 2 ways.

Use sed in bash to remove width and height attributes in SVG files

As per this answer on Stackoverflow, the issue can be resolved by removing just the width and height attributes.

This little script will recursively search your current working directory for SVG files, and remove the attributes for cross browser compatibility:

find ./ -name '*.svg' -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i "" -e 's/width="[0-9]*\.*\[0-9]*" //' -e 's/height="[0-9]*\.*\[0-9]*" //'

Caveats

Removing width and height attributes will force the image to occupy the full width of its container in non-IE browsers.

IE10 (other browsers require testing) will scale the images down to some arbitrary size - meaning you will need to add width: 100% to your CSS for those images to fit their containers.

Target IE with CSS

Since the above solution requires CSS anyways, we might as well use a hack to get IE to behave, and not worry about having to manage every individual SVG file.

The following will target all img tags containing an SVG file, in IE6+ (only IE9+ support SVG files, however).

/*
 * Let's target IE to respect aspect ratios and sizes for img tags containing SVG files
 *
 * [1] IE9
 * [2] IE10+
 */
/* 1 */
.ie9 img[src$=".svg"] {
  width: 100%; 
}
/* 2 */
@media screen and (-ms-high-contrast: active), (-ms-high-contrast: none) {
  img[src$=".svg"] {
    width: 100%; 
  }
}

Caveats

This targets every img tag with a src that ends in ".svg" in IE9, IE10, and IE11 - if you do not want this behaviour on a particular image, you will have to add a class to override this behaviour for that image.

Thanks very much for sharing this Larry. I added width and height attributes to all my SVGs so they would display properly on Android, so I used your CSS solution.

Thanks Larry, hello again Ben Pearson, Benn Pearson here, hope you're well.

Thanks for all the info!
Unfortunately using width: 100%; will make the SVG fill its container; which will render different from the other browsers. According to my testing, really need to specify the px.

@tomBryer that's correct - I usually end up putting the SVG in some sort of grid container that will constrain it to some width

The IE CSS fixes worked like a charm. Thanks!

IE vanquished again!

Thanks so much for this! Been trying to work out what was going on with this for ages. Thanks again.

There is such a good article here: https://css-tricks.com/scale-svg/

wow, that's quite an article! Great resource, thanks @bytehead

I got good, consistent results across the board sizing SVG in the big 3 browsers and Apple devices using CSS3 viewport width (vw) and viewport height (vh) units. IE 9 and 10 and iOS have problems with these, but Rodney Rehm's Buggyfill

https://github.com/rodneyrehm/viewport-units-buggyfill#user-content-changelog

does a great job fixing them. Hat tip to Zoltan@

http://www.useragentman.com/blog/2014/09/24/fixing-cross-browser-issues-with-css3-viewport-units-in-ie9-and-safari-for-ios/

for a good article and the explanations on using Rehm's Buggyfill.

Hi Everyone,
I've just had good results using a blank png file on the same scale as the svg, that is set to scale to full width. then i just set the svg to position:absolute and with&height 100%. seems to work cross browser ff, chrome and IE 9+. the png deals with scaling the div and the svg is really just along for the ride, the nice thing is that the png can be a smaller size than the svg just scaled the same, so it doesn't add much in size.

<div style="position:relative;">
    <svg viewBox="0 0 960 600" style="width: 100%; height: auto;position: absolute;" id="statesvg"/>
    <img state="width:100px; height:auto;" src="../IEsizer.png" style="width: 100%; height: auto;">
</div>

gracias totales 😄

Awesome, thanks!

I was also able to use this to target ie9:
img[src*=".svg"] {
width: 100%\9;
}

Swapping
width="www"
height="hhh"
for
viewBox="0 0 www hhh"
did it for me.

Does this still work on IE9 for images or lower than 16px? For me it looks like a 12 x 12px image gets truncated on IE9.

Thanks for this!

I patched your gist to ignore <img>s with src like //i.svg.example.com/my-jpeg.jpg or worse, img/my.svg.gif:

diff --git a/A.markdown b/A.markdown
index 0a06a0b..4d49f10 100644
--- a/A.markdown
+++ b/A.markdown
@@ -34,12 +34,12 @@ The following will target all `img` tags containing an SVG file, in IE6+ (only I
  * [2] IE10+
  */
 /* 1 */
-.ie9 img[src*=".svg"] {
+.ie9 img[src$=".svg"] {
   width: 100%; 
 }
 /* 2 */
 @media screen and (-ms-high-contrast: active), (-ms-high-contrast: none) {
-  img[src*=".svg"] {
+  img[src$=".svg"] {
     width: 100%; 
   }
 }
@@ -47,4 +47,4 @@ The following will target all `img` tags containing an SVG file, in IE6+ (only I

 ### Caveats

-This targets every `img` tag containing ".svg" in IE9, IE10, and IE11 - if you do not want this behaviour on a particular image, you will have to add a class to override this behaviour for that image.
\ No newline at end of file
+This targets every `img` tag with a `src` that ends in ".svg" in IE9, IE10, and IE11 - if you do not want this behaviour on a particular image, you will have to add a class to override this behaviour for that image.
\ No newline at end of file

I took over a customer site with this issue in IE.
I used the "Target IE with CSS" - worked like a charm! Thanks!

@ckoppelman thanks - updated!

Thank you for the CSS only solution, it works perfect.

You saved me a ton of time! I used the CSS solution.

@larrybotha Many thanks for this solution.

Thanks a lot for this.

Top fix!

For me the fix did work just partly.. height and width were removing the problems in some cases but it seems that the viewBox attribute has to be adapted too sometimes. Probably no issue for everyone who has the icons all in the same dimensions. So i had to correct manually.

For me this wasn't quite the right answer: I had to set height: 100% for the SVG because it had a fix width.
So setting the width to 100% broke it (for my case).

@larrybotha .. Many thanks for this! A 3rd party design we were implementing had a svg logo which only had a viewBox set. In IE11.. it was transparently larger and covered other interactive elements.. which therefore were not interactive anymore. Your hack fixed this in one easy copy paste! Also love the IE10+ detection.. never thought of that! Will use that again.

Another issue with IE11 is having inline style tags when you are embedding them.
I found https://github.com/svg/svgo/blob/master/plugins/inlineStyles.js to mostly fix all incoming svgs. The other solution is having Illustrator save them with inline styles.