Detect IE7 Compatibility mode in IE 8 / IE 9

[#1]

Request: Detect browsers that are IE8 or IE9, but are running in IE7 or IE8 compatibility mode, and provide this in the Browser report. I believe there are solutions available, that can detect this within the User Agent string IE sends.

Currently, Omniture treats IE7 and IE8 in IE7 compat mode exactly the same way (at least for the Browsers metric). I assume this will apply to IE9 as well.

Business goal: Avoid bad user experience. Our website renders the navigation (hover state drop-downs) correctly in IE7 and IE8, but does not do so for IE8 running in IE7 Compat mode (and possibly IE9 running in IE8 Compat mode). We've had a few customers call in about this. The change required to fix this is pretty expensive (we adopt IE7 standards, or rework our website to support Compat mode etc). I wanted to know how many customers are impacted by this prior to deciding which way to go (fix or not fix).

[#2]

The simple trick for detecting IE8, IE9 and soon IE10 in compatability mode is to look for User Agent strings that contain "MSIE 7.0" and also "Trident/4.0", "Trident/5.0" or "Trident/6.0" respectively. The user agent string for IE7 doesn't contain "Trident" at all.

I maintain a SAINT classification of the User Agent in order to provide this information for my site, but it's a lot of work keeping it up to date because the User Agent strings change so much (there are hundreds of thousands of unique strings out there today). It would save a lot of work for sites caught up in Microsofts "Compatibility View List" if Adobe could provide accurate figures on Internet Explorer out of the box.