My understanding of IE Compatibility Mode/View is that you can specify which version of IE you want to render a domain (or set of domains) in.
But when I go to Tools >> Compatibility View Settings it only allows me to add a bunch of sites to be displayed in Compatibility View.
My question is, what version of IE is this Compatibility View using? If I add example.com and blah.net to Compatibility View, what version of IE will they be displayed in?
You're conflating two seperate functions for two different audiences.
Developers can use meta tags to force IE to render similarly to an older version:-
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" >
Users can click the compatibility view button in the browser front end, which forces IE to render similarly to it's previous version e.g. IE8 would render as IE7, IE7 as IE6 etc.
I say similarly because the forced mode is different under some circumstances to the actual old version, one does not precisely emulate the other, and I've seen some bugs which appear to belong to compatibility mode alone!
