IE 8.0 Beta 2 with SharePoint, what’s the story?

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Today Internet Explorer 8.0 Beta 2 was released. Well, if you tried Beta 1 with Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, you may notice that some of the features like content editor webpart does not function properly, even in IE7 mode.

But IE7 mode should be the same as original IE7, not to cause new problems. After several months’ bugfix and feature improvement, that problem now is gone.

There’re also some changes between IE8 Beta 1 and Beta 2. For example, there’s no IE7 mode button anymore, it is changed to a “Compatibility View” button next to refresh button. And that is not turned on by default.

So what will happen if I use IE8 Beta 2 to access a SharePoint site?

That depends on your master page of the site. IE8 Beta 2 will check DOCTYPE and meta tag to determine wether to use Compatibility View or not. If there is no DOCTYPE indicated in the page, IE8 Beta 2 will use this mode by default, and you will not see the button at all. This is what happened for default master pages come with SharePoint Server. All things should work by default.

It is quite common that you are using your own modified themes in master pages. So what if DOCTYPE is there in the pages? Will it cause any problem?

Maybe. But if you want to ensure everything works, I would recommend to add a meta tag in your master pages:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />  (You can take a look at www.msn.com to get the idea)

When IE8 Beta 2 reads this line, it will automatically switch to Compatibility View and make everything right. This can be seen as a temporary solution. IE8 native mode will be supported in future SharePoint v3 service pack.