IE8’s compatibility view is not IE7

It would appear that IE8 has been released today which coincides with me finding out something unpleasant about its compatibility view. I’d assumed switching to compatibility view would show the web page using IE7’s rendering engine. But this doesn’t seem to be the case. Go to the Process Mapping website and try out the dropdown menus. When you move outside the boundaries of a menu it should disappear, as you’d expect. Using IE6, IE7, IE8 (native mode), FireFox, Safari and Chrome that’s exactly what happens. But in IE8’s compatibility view the menu stays where it is.

So I can only assume compatibility view is not IE7 in new clothing. Given that anybody can switch to compatibility view for whatever reason and returning to that site will stick with that setting, this means that the introduction of IE8 means rather than having one other browser to test against, we have two instead! Oh great…