IE Compatibility Mode Headache

Having problems with IE's Compatibility mode? I couldn't figure out why a site I had recently designed worked consistently in IE6, IE7, IE8, IE9 beta, but failed to work on IE8 under the same conditions on another machine.

The culprit, IE8 compatibility mode! Luckily, you can disable this, as do many sites such as Google. You have two flavours to choose from; HTTP Headers or META tags. I opted for the simple .htaccess implementation with the line:

Header set X-UA-Compatible "IE=edge"

This removes the button from the toolbar and forces use of the latest standards rendering mode. You can select from other modes if you so wish, but with IE9 on the horizon I wanted to keep it up-to-date.