Lately I have been playing with the RC1 release of IE8 and to my shock-horror, it makes a total mockery of many of the pages I administer and run. To the rescue is the so called ‘compatibility’ mode, created as a layer that allows your sites to look, feel and function exactly as they did in IE7. Allegedly, the magic code is:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

My initial testing concluded that it seemed to do the job and I let it rest, hoping to have survived yet another Microsoft blunder on the cheap… Not so. Turns out that you still get differences and issues in CSS. This is non-fatal but the fact that certain JS scrolling modules I had written now seemed to output nothing at all worried me. A google search revealed that Microsoft are managing a list of 2500+ sites, submitted by testers and reported to still have problems despite of the compatibility layer! Nice… I guess I will be submitting my own entries — and so should you… As if the Safari 4 beta was not bad enough…

Word to the wise, do not install a RC (release candidate) on a machine that you value – to be safe, download a copy of the Microsoft Virtual Machine and an XP image, then install on it.