Besides (and playing devils advocate), is there anything really wrong with forcing people to update their sites so that they are actually built properly, and in the process, hopefully making the web more future proof, more accessible, etc etc?

Thirdly, if you *can* force the browser into a previous rendering mode, how is that a step forwards in any way. It’s certainly not quicker than the current FF beta (although, granted, we are only at beta 1), and now you can push it into the previous rendering mode to boot.. huh. If you don’t force people to do something, then they won’t, and we’ll presumably have to wait for IE9 for the IE8 rendering mode button, so that people will update their sites for IE8?

It’s not that I don’t think IE8 as a whole isn’t a good thing - i’m sure that it is, and I hope that the activities options open up social networking to a whole new set of people (and in the process, cause IT departments the world over a headache), it’s just that I really think you either update the browser, or you don’t - and at the moment, I don’t really think with the option there, it’s the update which it should be.