First of all, I really don’t like MSIE7′s rendering mode, but it is better than that of MSIE6.

MSIE8 shipped in “standards mode” by default, in other words, “not compatible with MSIE7 pages mode.” That’s a problem.

I use Yahoo!’s YUI CSS libraries to “zero out” all the discrepancies between browsers so I have a clean slate on which to build. Most of the time it works pretty well — until MSIE8.

Even in “standards mode” MSIE8 renders my pages MUCH differently than MSIE7, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Why? No idea yet. In the meantime, here’s how to make your pages load the same way in MSIE8 as they did in MSIE7.

Add the following meta tag to your header:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=7″ />

Common Name	Compatibility Mode Value
“Quirks” Mode	IE=5
IE7 Mode	IE=7
IE8 Standards Mode	IE=8
Always Use Latest Mode	IE=edge

Of course that’s not the “fix” but it will get you by until you can get to the root of the problem.

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