I’m a little late on this but one of the funniest announcements of out of  MIX08 was the IE 8 Virtual Machines announcement.  I’ve been running the IE8 Beta which was also launched at MIX08, mainly because I badly broke IE 7 trying to get a version of IE6 installed for testing.

The new IE8 virtual machines, or  Internet Application Compatibility VPC image,  let you run old version of Internet Explorer.   In order to make your website work with Internet Explorer it often required several ugly work-arounds to get the different versions to run together.  In my case these ended up breaking my version of IE 7.

I’m glad that Microsoft is actually taking this situation seriously and releasing the IE8 Virtual Machines.   I think its really telling though how much damage Microsoft and IE has done to web compatibility though.   Other browsers like Firefox aren’t perfect but they don’t see to suffer from anywhere near the compatibility issues and it doesn’t see that IE 8 is going to be radically better…