June 23, 2008 - Internet Explorer 8: The IE=7 tag

We've been testing our sites using IE8 Beta 1 recently.

All of the sites are fine except one.  There, the site's non-standard Ajax-based UI fails miserably under IE8, while working well under IE6 and IE7.

We had been considering inclusion of IE8 support in a major release due near the end of the year.  This would have added a fair bit of development and testing work, but would have re-written the UI to avoid the problems found.  Unfortunately, the major release is being delayed, and is in danger of being released only after IE8 is available.  We really wanted to support the GA version of IE8 as soon as it's publicly available, so we needed to do something sooner.

We found that there is another solution.  Fortunately, IE8 supports a new tag: "IE=7". 

According to http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/06/10/introducing-ie-emulateie7.aspx, this tag will cause IE8 to "Display in IE7 Standards Mode", rather than the new default IE8 Standards Mode. 

So we created the custom HTTP header for the site and ran some tests.  It worked just fine.

Assuming this holds up through subsequent IE8 Beta releases (IE8 Beta 2 is due in August), this will allow us to release a minor revision to our problematic site, and not cost us much time from our major release.

For us, IE=7 appears to be the right solution - at least temporariliy.

see also: http://www.sqablogs.com/jstrazzere/1557/Things+To+Look+For+When+Testing+Your+Site+With+IE8.html

Are you testing your site under IE8 yet?
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