Inbuilt IE8 hack for SharePoint 2013

Doing yet another UI branding for a customer, and especially the optimzation for each and any Internet Explorer version from 8 on, I stumbled upon something quite interesting and useful too.

I mostly prefer the CSS rule hacks (e.g. using /9 for IE8) over comments and separate stylesheets and/or classes (read more about the options in Web Designer Wall), and try to come up with the most browser-generic solutions as possible. But IE8 is a problem child, that's for sure (fortunately, with SP2013 we don't need to deal with IE7 anymore!). 

The SharePoint team has obviously noted this too. So what I discovered today, when changing the color of the left side of the suite bar (id="suiteBarLeft") is this general class ms-core-needIEFilter that gets inserted to the page by some SharePoint JavaScript when the browser mode is Internet Explorer 8.

For example, this suiteBarLeft just happens to get an IE8 fix for its background, resulting in my custom background color not taking effect. And !important does not do the trick, for the overriding CSS rule is actually a filter rule, not background(-color) rule - which is there too, actually, set to transparent, so the complete fix for the suiteBar backgrouns customization is

.ms-core-needIEFilter #suiteBarLeft {

    filter:none;
    background-color: #92D050;

}

As stated, this class ms-core-needIEFilter exists globally (somewhere - I could not place the class in the DOM tree) on the SharePoint pages when browser is IE8, and thus is quite useful for any IE8 hacks that are needed in any custom UI. I tried out a few, and it works like a dream :)