Microsoft Irony
16 July 2009
Microsoft (sorry, Windows in a vain attempt to reduce the risk of anti-trust suits) Internet Explorer 8 has “compatibility mode” (read incompatibility), to “improve the appearance of web pages designed for older browsers”. In other words: now we’ve built a standards-compliant-ish browser, we need a mode that makes it render like its older, non-compliant siblings because every site on the web serves bad code when it sees our user agent. Once again, Microsoft is hoist upon its own petard.