Quote Originally Posted by penagate
It's not lame. It's a necessity in order to avoid breaking pages that currently test for IE. Such pages would attempt to work around bugs that no longer exist in IE 8.
No, it is lame. First off, they are using a meta tag / server header to do exactly what the DOCTYPE was created to do. That's ass backwards. Then, they baby web developers who can't create correct HTML.

At some point Microsoft will have to bite the bullet and end backwards compatability otherwise they will never be able to properly implement any new client side features like CSS3.
Quote Originally Posted by penagate
But, conversely, many applications require IE.

Catch 22...
Well, that's the developer's problem for developing the application incorrectly.