windows - Differences in IE8 behavior between XP, Vista, Win7?

Question

Is there any significant difference in behavior (HTML, CSS, Javascript, ...) with Internet Explorer 8 on different operating systems?

In other words, will a web page work the same way across IE8+XP, IE8+Vista and IE8+Win7, or are there some significant differences?

(I'm aware that installed plugins and fonts will have an impact, but that's a bit outside my scope at the moment; assuming compatibility mode X-UA-Compatible: IE=8 or edge)

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Although The IEBlog contains very useful information, I haven't found this data there - so I'm assuming that there should not be any difference. However, search has turned up this (vague) question: "IE8 on XP: looks great! IE8 on Vista: looks terrible". Will have to check IE8+{XP,V,7} in VM in the meantime.

Answer 1

There are at least 6 versions of MSIE 8 and there are likely differences in layout due to bug fixes in the latter releases. A list of versions is available on Microsoft's support site:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969393

MSIE8 on Windows XP is version 8.00.6001.18702 and on Windows 7 is version 8.00.7600.16385.