IE8 | SiteMastery Blog

IE8 – Breaking the Web One Site at at Time

July 24th, 2009 |

Since my stock in trade is creating and modifying templates of all sorts, of course I have to deal with the various browsers and how my sites look in each.

Internet Explorer 7 drove developers insane until ways were found to trick it into performing closer to standards. So, “hacks” were applied to templates more often than not.

Now, Internet Explorer 8 is out and is more standards-compliant. (Yay!) So of course it breaks templates built for IE7. (Sigh.) To be fair, they did incorporate a “compatibility mode” button for users to click if the site they visit “looks funny”.

If you’ve looked at your website with IE8 and it needs compatibility mode, you can fix it so that your viewers don’t have to hit that button. Then you can re-work your template code at your leisure without worrying about the IE8 user first impression.

All it takes is one line of code in your <head> section:

This one snippet of code will save you untold headaches if your template was built for IE7.