If you have seen the excellent* comparison of browsers, you may actually believe that Microsoft made improvements with Internet Explorer 8.  However, you would be mistaken.  For the past 48 hours, I have been in bug-squashing and clean-up mode on liteGrid.  During that time, I have repeatedly found cleaner, more elegant ways to do handle some of the rich functionality (such as column resizing).  Unfortunately, every single one of these has failed in IE8.  Rendering it in “quirks” mode fixed some of the issues, but created even more of its own problems.  Here’s my favorite example so far.  The resizable columns in liteGrid are handled by draggable divs embedded within the th elements.  As you drag the elements, they resize the columns.  That part works great.  Except when the column shrinks and begins truncating text.  When that happens, the draggable div mysteriously disappears completely.  That is, of course, unless you assign a non-transparent background color to it, then it works perfect!  You can also assign a bogus background image URL to it, and it will work just fine.

Microsoft: stop kidding yourselves, and stop lying to consumers.  Internet Explorer 8 doesn’t deserve to be listed on the same page as either Firefox or Google Chrome. It’s not a browser, it’s an abomination.

</rant>

*full of crap