Remember the big deal Microsoft made about how Internet Explorer 8 would finally be standards compliant. Aside from some odd stuff they were doing, it looked like they were actually putting in an effort to follow through with their promise, or at least something close to it.
Apparently, the a lot of of web pages will load in IE7 mode instead of standards mode. The Register has the full details.
This week, the promise was broken. It lasted less than six months. Now that Internet Explorer IE8 beta 2 is released, we know that many, if not most, pages viewed in IE8 will not be shown in standards mode by default. The dirty secret is buried deep down in the «Compatibility view» configuration panel, where the «Display intranet sites in Compatibility View» box is checked by default. Thus, by default, intranet pages are not viewed in standards mode.
So all intranet sites will be shown in non-standards mode. Then we have all the version targetting nonsense they’ve been planning.
Oh, and guess what happens whenever a page loads in standards mode? A little icon appears showing a broken page. When clicked, it forces the page into “IE7 compatibility” mode. So the browser tricks people into not using standards mode.
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