How to Get the List of Sites in Microsoft’s IE8 Compatibility View
As you probably already know, IE8 has something called “compatibility view” where it renders a website using the old buggy IE7 method instead of the more correct IE8 way. It has a default list of incompatible websites that it downloads from Microsoft. The list can be downloaded by typing res://iecompat.dll/iecompatdata.xml into the IE8 address bar.
I downloaded that list today, and found, not really to my surprise, that microsoft.com was listed! I guess everyone who uses an alternative browser already knows that many pages on microsoft.com are written with very sloppy coding that do not validate with a CSS or HTML validator, but this sort of confirms it. Even their own browser, with all its CSS bugs fixed, needs it to be rendered in compatibility view.
To be fair, there are lots of other sites in that list too, including Live.com, Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia, Ebay, Blogger, WordPress.com, MySpace, Flickr, Amazon… The list goes on. I reckon that there are more than 2000 sites on that list. Interestingly, mozilla.com is also on that list.
Anyway, it’s possible to avoid getting on that list by setting a meta tag on your web page. One of my favorite sites, The Site Wizard, has an easy-to-understand guide on that. I’m still looking for a good WordPress plugin to do the job for me here, although it renders fine.