IE8 will contain 3 browser engines fully compatible with IE6/7

Through IE 8, Microsoft wants to achieve both compatibility and performance. In terms of compatibility, Microsoft hopes that Internet Explorer 8 will be compatible with websites customized for Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 6 without damaging the webpage. In addition, Microsoft also hopes to improve IE to meet the standards of mainstream modern browsers so that IE8 can compete with Firefox and Opera.

The solution proposed by Microsoft is to build three conversion engines in IE8, one for dealing with today's browser standards and one for IE7 standard web pages, there is also a Web page customized for IE6.

"IE8 will not damage your website, but will send back incompatible content. If the website is displayed normally under IE6 and IE7, you only need to use the IE7 conversion engine to browse or optimize the webpage code under IE8 ."

"Another way is to use CSS for IE8 if you have processed the website's CSS to make it display normally in Firefox and Safari ." To make the webpage fully compatible with IE8 as much as possible, developers can add X-UA-Compatiblevalue = "IE = EmulateIE7 code to the webpage, which enables IE8 to browse the website in IE7 mode. Of course, there are also compatible browsing modes available for users.

 

Appendix:

With Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft is working to balance its commitment to notbreaking the web, namely to perpetuate compatibility with content that was designed specifically for IE7 and IE6, but also to embrace modern web standards to reach a level of support that will place IE on par with rival browsers such as Firefox and Opera.

The solution delivered by the Redmond company was the introduction of three rendering engines in Internet Explorer 8, one for modern standards, one for IE7-centric content, and the last for items that were tailored to IE6. Fact is that the next iteration of Internet Explorer will joggle with all rendering engines in order to accommodate websites and applications built not only for IE8, but also for previous versions of the browser.

"IE8 doesn' t really break your website. what happens is, you're sending back content that is not very standards compliant. it worked in IE7 and IE7 wasn' t the most standards compliant browser out there. so, for IE8 you just need to go and either use the IE7 rendering engine or go tweak the HTML in your page and make it work, "Microsoft's Pete LePage
...

1. Interview with Microsoft IE8 Beta2: Revealing the top ten highlights of New Products)
2. Analysis of three new reliability functions of IE8
3. Web browser competition Firefox3.1 leads IE8 worst