Since my conditional comments target less than or equal to IE7 or 6, then anything fed to IE8 is code for real web browsers, and yes, IE8 seems to be mostly acting like one.

I don’t get where I’ve read on the ie blog, advising on not using “edge” in production but using “IE8″ in the meta tag. Do they think it’s likely that their future browser development will stray from the standards path it is on, and they just might make IE9 horribly broken? We develop assuming all other web browser’s newest versions are “edge”. Should I not look forward to future versions of IE implementing even more standards rather than less?

BTW, when reading about ie8 rendering modes and version targeting, note the date of posts you find, as much reaction was generated the beginning of 2008, then ms reversed their decision for ie8 to operate in standards mode by default, much to the relief of the web development community.