Haha… I’m experiencing a similar problem, although the page works excellent in IE8 using IE8 Standards mode, but the browser somehow panics and switches the mode into IE7 Standards mode (which ironically is not the same as IE7 Standards), finally the page crashes.

Ever try to make sense of the IE8 Compatibility View: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/08/27/introducing-compatibility- view.aspx

@ James Heaver: It’s only rosy internally. All our internet facing websites sill need to be hacked for IE6 compatibility. I have no illusions about that. IE6 will still be around for a while.

Internal websites and intrantet used only by our employees, from company issued laptops or workstation on site are a different matter. Since we are pushing out IE8 on all of our machines we can safely drop IE6 support and simply put up a note that says “upgrade to IE8, use Firefox/Chrome/Opera or just use company laptop”. Also with less than 100 employees we can deploy, troubleshoot and enforce this. If we were a huge corp, or governmental org then yeah – I might be weary about IE8 upgrade.

In the UK, and I would suspect government departments everywhere ie6 is still going to be the norm until 2011 atleast.

Tom Watson, one of a handful of tech-minded MPs asked questions in parliment to each government department about when they were going to upgrade and many departments have no plans to before 2011. A few trailblazers are only now considering whether they should upgrade to ie7.

Doing some quick back of the envelope calculations with quickly googled stats public sector workers add up to ~2% of the working population in the UK.

I’m pleased that things are looking up where you are, but I’m not sure that the ie6 picture is as rosy as everyone thinks.

@ Matt`: Well, it depends what kind of job you land, and how big is your company. If your a sysadmin at a large company you will likely have a help desk buffer between you and the users. If you work at a small company, you might end up manning the help desk yourself if your are short on staff.

If you go into software development, testing, engineering and all that you will be fine. You will only need to deal with pointy haired management… Well, maybe client also. Unless you end up on the support side. But you will probably be buffered from the regular, every day user incompetence most of the time. :)

Unless of course your job description is like mine “software development, system administration and etc..” where “etc..” means “everything even remotely related to anything electronic”.

Needless to say, we needed a better solution than trying to train our users. It’s sad but these people react to knowledge the same way most people react to the smell of a freshly ripped fart – they make a face, and try to excuse themselves and leave the room as soon as possible. Which makes me wonder how do they acquire the much needed on-the-job skills such as using Excel formulas and such… Oh wait… Never mind, they use pre-made templates with formulas already entered in, and when they need to add/remove rows, create totals or do anything out of the ordinary they call the help desk.

Would you excuse me, I need to go and curl up in a foetal position while I contemplate the probable outcome of going into the area I’m almost certainly going to want to work in. God help me, I just hope I can end up somewhere where I don’t have to talk to users… or management… or, ah fuckit this isn’t going to work out is it…