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Mike Davies at Isolani.co.uk has two insightful articles about Compatibility View and blacklisting of domains in IE8 based on Scott Dickens post on the IEBlog

IE8 Blacklist: forcing standards rendering opt-in and the follow up The IE8 Blacklist minefield

IE8 will by default render pages in standard mode but you have the option of using Compatibility View to render the page in an emulated IE7 mode. The new thing now is that you can subscribe on a list of websites that should be rendered in Compatibility mode, and if enough people select Compatibility View for a website it will end up on the list and after an update you also will render this page in Compatibility View. Of course this feature is already enabled if you use “Default install” of IE8, so most people will probably never change this.

IETester is an indispensable tool when debugging css or javascript. It have all
the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 2, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 in one nifty package.

I used to rely on IE7 and a standalone version of IE6 for my testing, as Windows makes it hard to have more than one instance of Internet Explorer on the system.
I didn’t want to break a working environment to install the beta versions of IE8, with this tool I can finally do some testing and see what IE8 is good for. IETester works on both XP and Vista, it is still an alpha so there is some bugs.