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Does anyone in marketing care what the User Agent says?

Change that and be done!

It's more complicated than that. If a browser breaks Sharepoint or any other intranet site, it won't get deployed. I imagine there are many, many, many corporations who still haven't upgraded to IE7.

One possible solution is to identify as IE <= 7 to intranet sites (which can be designated via Group Policy) and IE >= 8 to non-intranet sites. Of course, this means admins have to properly define intranet/non-intranet, which means much rioting will ensue.

Poor IE team. You're getting screwed because management decided to rest on their laurels.

If the big barrier to acceptance is intranets -- where the company controls the web server itself -- then an additional solution is available: Rather than requiring all new web pages to contain a new "OK for IE 8" flag, simply tag the old pages with a new "Not OK for IE 8" flag, to trigger legacy rendering. I imagine you wouldn't even need to edit the webpages -- just add some module to the web server that automatically rewrites the header.

...There must be a good reason why this would never work, because I don't recall hearing it proposed before.

The good reason why it'll never work is that it has to be done for bilions of pages.

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