Since my last post I found another piece in the IE 8 puzzle. Turns out it’s even easier than I said to test for earlier versions of IE now. As discussed in this IE 8 Developer Tools Whitepaper, you can open the developer tools that come with IE 8 and change the compatibility mode from the view menu there. The options are Quirks (IE 5), Strict (IE 7) and Standards (IE 8). Confusing naming aside, this is a quicker way to change the modes and doesn’t require a restart of the browser. My question still remains then, what else changes between the IE 7/8 restart that the toolbar button requires?

The developer tools themselves looks underwhelming considering what else is available; Firebug for pretty much everything and Drosera for its very intuitive dom and object browser as well as style editing, but at least it’s a step past javascript popup error – do you want to debug – yes – wait for Visual Studio to start. I know of Companion.JS and DebugBar but experience have taught me they’re not that reliable. More IE 8 browser modes