Force IE7 Compatibility

I'm not a HTML dog so this may be old news to many people, and for all I know it's the way you fix issues with IE7 and IE6. Nonetheless, I've noticed many web pages are not rendering correctly in Internet Explorer 8 for me. There's a tiny icon in the right of the address bar (looks like a broken page...very appropriate icon). When you click it, it forces your browser into IE7 mode so pages built to be compatible with older browsers will still render correctly. And IE8 keeps track of that domain so you don't have to click it on every visit. Exactly what they changed and why, I do not know. I do know we'll be seeing a lot of this meta tag hack added to tweak the doctype/browser into believing you are using IE7. <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

IE8 adoption is under 2% today but growing, of course, as it will be bundled with nearly every new PC. You can test your pages using the new Developer Tools that come with IE8 which are really nice (hit F12 to see) and then you can toggle between IE7, IE8 and IE8 Compatibility modes. Adding the meta tag above will make it so your users will not have to click the broken page icon or toggle between modes.