IE8 Band-Aid

Internet Explorer 7 was great. A lot of folks will hate all things Microsoft to their grave, but I have to give them credit where credit is due. IE7 worked, and it worked good. It was finally easy to make “The Big 3″ all render a page in almost exactly the same way. I thought the long struggle was finally over. Then Firefox 3 came out and completely ruined the concept of an auto-cropping <div>.

Microsoft has decided to screw up a good thing as well in an effort to out-muck the folks at Mozilla, or as they would put it “become more standards-compliant”. They have once again changed the way margins, padding and the box-model in general work in IE8 (causing many an animated menuing/accordion script to fail). Fortunately, IE7 isn’t gone, just muzzled. Adding the following meta tag (at the top of the meta section, or IE8 may ignore it) will force IE8 to render the page with IE7:

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

It is little more than a band-aid approach, but it works, and in my case buys the time I need to find a real fix for several production sites this issue affected. My thanks to Estelle for her post on this solution.