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Comment by JonoW | Hacker News Reader

MS really don't help themselves though. My company won't upgrade from IE7 because they are worried about breaking a legacy,critical web-app. If MS could build a feature into IE9 that allowed you to specify a white-list of URLs/domains (set by AD group policy) that always used the IE6/IE7/IE9 renderer/js engine for the tab it was opened in - boom corporates could start upgrading. It's also holding back adoption of Windows 7.

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That exists, it's called 'Compatibility Mode'. And by default (at least in IE8, at my current client's deployment) it uses it for all Intranet Sites. You can also use meta-tag 'X-UA-Compatible' to force a certain compatibility (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288325(v=vs.85).as...)

EDIT: Apparently the best you can do for IE6 is to 'emulate IE5,' which actually means 'emulate IE7 quirks mode'. Oh well...

Compatability mode doesn't support ie6, and I believe its only for the renderer, not the JavaScript engine.

It is for the JavaScript engine too: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/s4esdbwz(v=VS.85).as...

Yeah, it doesn't seem to be a complete solution. My client actually ended up deploying a virtualized IE8 to sit alongside IE6 on all workstations.

I suspect it's not quite as easy as that, but you still have a very good point. I wonder why they haven't pursued this path actually - It would be a very Microsoft-ish solution.

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