Okay,so for those of you who may not follow the 'browser wars' like we do, Microsoft is getting ready to push a new version of its Internet Explorer browser to the public. After a January Release Candidate release, a March production release is a decent possibility.
IE has long been a troublesome browser because of Microsoft's unwillingness to adapt a set of industry-wide standards and render pages in a way compliant with those standards. However, because of its large market share, web developers have simply had to "deal with it."
With IE8, Microsoft is finally trying to be standards-complaint. What does that mean? It means they're having to deal with a problem of their own making - that they're now releasing a product that they know in advance will 'break' most sites designed to work correctly with all previous versions of IE. Their solution? A feature called "Compatibility Mode."
It's actually two features working together. First, Microsoft assembled a list of sites that they know won't work correctly with the new IE. Among the 2,400 and counting? Just a few you'll recognize: CNN.com, Ebay.com, Apple.com, Google.com, and even Microsoft.com
If you don't go to a site on the list, IE8 displays a button at the end of the address bar (see screenshot above). It looks, appropriately, like a broken web page - but the 'tooltip' that pops up when you hover over the button says it's for websites "designed for older browsers." Way to completely ignore that it's only older versions of IE...
Want my recommendation? Instead of having to click a button when a web page loads incorrectly or too slowly in the hopes that it fixes the problem, just switch to a better browser. You'll find the experience is faster and better. For example, the javascript animation we use on our website (the pages sliding off the screen and back) only works in fully compliant browsers (it still doesn't work in IE8). That doesn't mean our site breaks - IE users just don't get to see the snazzy animation. In other words, if you're using IE, you may be missing out on some of the coolest things the Internet has to offer.
If you haven't already, try one of these out instead:
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