IE8 though, still tips a hat to its less illustrious predecessors with “compatibility mode” – something sure to confuse the browsing public, especially that broken page icon. To me it just seems to be a half-baked solution that will cause more problems than its worth – I can envisage people clicking away at that button and ending up in page layout hell.

It’s a hole that Microsoft have dug themselves into by not doing incremental updates to their browser rendering engine, so forcing developers to keep in step as new, non backwards-compatible, changes appear.

Rather than delving into it further, I’d like to propose a solution. Instead of dealing with the various idiosyncratic rendering engine(s) in IE, how about letting developers specify, say, WebKit as the rendering engine for their sites? Microsoft engineers have shown that they can switch rendering modes on the fly with their “X-UA-Compatible” HTTP header – would it be too much to ask for support of something like…

header('X-IE-RenderEngine: WebKit');

which could tell IE to pass the incoming document off to WebKit?

Google, Arora and Apple have shown they can get excellent WebKit based browsers running on Windows – why not Microsoft, too?