With th release of IE8 you may habe noticed a small button called “compatibility mode” in the browser. By clicking this button it allows users to view your website in IE7 compatability mode within IE8. Now this might be a useful feature when the website owners either can’t be bothered or haven’t had the time to test and fix their site in IE8 but for those who have tested and fixed their site for IE8 it can cause problems because it turns out that IE8 in compatibility mode isn’t the same as IE7 ( thanks Microsoft) so this effectively leads to another browser to test in, as if testing in IE6, IE7 and IE8 wasn’t already enough browsers from 1 company to test in.

There is however a meta tag that you can add to your pages that will disable the compatabiliy view mode, so your nicely coded sitre that works perfectly in IE8 will continue to work as it should in IE8.

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=8″ />

Its probably worth noting that the default setting in IE8 is to render the pages as IE8 and not in compatability mode, but why allow users the choice when, if working correctly in IE8, there should be no reason to use the compatability button.