The menace of the Opera

Sounds like the worst job ever, debugging IE whole day long

It's just too bad that "Do The Right Thing" comes a distant second after "Don't Alienate Clueless Developers" for Microsoft.

Here's an idea: Microsoft should pre-release IE8 as a by-request download for Vista so developers can fix their sites. Then 6 or 8 months later, start including it in Vista installs.

GreyWyvern: That is what they did with IE7.
There were a couple of Betas, you could download and test your sites in.

But still a lot of pages broke, because the developers of these pages didn't check them or didn't care.

Thinking rationally for a moment, don't you think this will be "harmless" unless other browser vendors give in? I am specifically talking about Mozilla and Apple, but also Opera. If all those browser vendors resolve not to support these meta-tags, then it will be an IE-exclusive thing, like conditional comments.

I mean... sure, there will be a couple of sites that will use code designed for IE6/7/8, but if they want support for Gecko/WebKit/Presto, then they need to do more than just add this amazingly silly meta-tag. So for sites that have minimum support requirements of at least IE and FF, this won't be a solution.
However, there will probably be more sites in the future that break in other browsers because they are not designed for anything but IE (at least if it maintains its market share).

Gladly enough, I don't see anybody except MS maintain a couple of different rendering engines/modes, so we should be "relatively" safe...

Let me know of any subtle logic errors you can spot

@olli: I don't see your point. For "non-meta" sites, i.e. all that are deployed right now, it will still be "just IE7". And if they care to support Firefox, there might lie your gold in reverse engineering.

The ones that will use the meta-tag need to work in FF, too. So unless Mozilla adopts the meta-silly like Gustafson recommends (which is unlikely?), things should be in status quo shouldn't they?

And reverse engineering IE8-mode means to implement the "switch", else there's nothing triggering the "new mode". So if Apple, Mozilla and Opera don't implement this, then the burden will be on the developers to make sure FF still works fine. So this could still be a lot of reverse engineering to match FF's behavior, but not as much as would be needed if any of the companies actually tried to emulate IE8 in any way (or is it?)...

This assumes that IE market share doesn't go up again, of course. I really doubt that, though.