it seems ie8 (like its predecessors) has no support for svg, mathml or the canvas tag.
this is really unfortunate and simply holds innovation back.

firefox has made such major advances - witness the plethora of add-ins, themes, debuggers.

i happen to be a ten-year veteran of microsoft, so this is not by any means a rant. but i stopped using ie for browsing or for development years ago, and see no reason to switch back.