The IE blog is usually troll-central for opera/firefox fans who want to crap on anything the IE team says, and this is no exception. There are a LOT of comments hating on the IE8 meta tag and many people writing emotional pleas like "don't make it opt-in, just break the web!" The pleas sound a little like the deranged, salivating imaginings of people who would like nothing better than to throw the web into chaos by having an IE release that breaks everything and takes months or years to sort out. How does this make sense? People seem to forget that the alt-browsers have quirks modes, too, and that if they had each started by breaking the web, they never would have gotten off the ground.

A lot of the haters are like, "nobody cares if mom's home page from 1999 breaks because of new default behavior, so just break it already!", but de facto standards are standards, too. They forget that MS owes a lot to corporations who they've trained over the years to write utterly IE-dependent functionality. They are beholden to the zillions of pages on corporate intranets that were created on the promise that MS "does" backward compatibility. Changing the default behavior (not using opt-in) would certainly stab that cash cow right in the eye.

I don't support internet facing web apps, so am I just wrong on this? The IE7/IE8 opt-ins seem so simple, I just don't understand what the big deal is. If IE8 delivers on its promises, it seems like whatever profile you're already using for firefox compability will be directly applicable to IE8, so as not to be like an entirely new browser you have to support.