I was intentionally avoiding loading up internet explorer 8 simply because I knew it was going to break some of my pages.  But today I couldn’t wait any longer since it was the official release.  Sure enough it was worse than I expected.  Internet Explorer 8 broke nearly every site I run!  Some to worse degrees than others, but most notable was the sites running the dojo script library.  It seems there is an issue with all versions except 1.3 RC1, even dojotookits site doesn’t work right.  The relevant error is below:
Webpage error details
Message: Member not found.
Line: 20
Char: 48151
Code: 0
URI: http://www.dojotoolkit.com/sites/all/modules/dojo/dtk_build/dojo/dojo.js
Hmmm.. Bummer, so after some digging it seemed the IE 7 compatible mode fixes the issue totally, so it must be a dom rendering issue, because I find it hard to believe the scripting engine is also changed that significantly (I could be wrong).  At any rate, my headache went away quickly once I discovered there is a meta tag you can use to force IE8 directly into compatible mode when it hits your site.  Add this meta tag in your head section:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

This probably shouldn’t be considered a permanent fix as there is probably a good reason as to why you are having rendering issues, odds are it is the same in safari or firefox.  However, script errors that are IE 8 unique that will take some digging to figure out, but I intend to fix them and remove the tag when able. 

On the plus side, IE 8 does seem quite a bit faster and cleaner.  So hopefully it will be a positive move. I’m all for standards compliance too!

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