I agree with Crusty about nixing the fixed-position sidebar: any screen smaller (not as tall) as that menu simply can never get to it. Which is one of those user-frustration-moments you see where people yank their hair out by the handful and scream so loud their uvula is screaming too.
I learned something interesting from one of my bosses the other day:
he said “Hey why does the menu of the [rewritten site who’s only sitting on the dev server] look short?”
I knew this was my display: table menu set for IE7 and 6, but he claimed he was viewing in 8 and the other boss has a copy of IE9. I asked him to check if he had accidentally turned on Compatibility view (since this would make IE8 render like IE7).
He came back later and said that while he hadn’t turned it on himself, that it was on by default for pages rendered on an intranet which is what our dev server is.
I’ve never heard this before, but if it’s true across the board then it’s something we devs should be aware of: once these dev sites go online, if they are not to remain on an intranet, no need to worry about someone turning on compat view (and if they did choose to do so, fine: you can either force them back to IE8 or 9 mode with an ugly retarded meta tag called “Edge”, or they simply get the site as you built it for IE7, no disaster there).
