I’m having some trouble setting up virtual machines for testing IE versions (I use a mac) and have noticed on IE8 it has a browser switching mode.
Does this mode do a full switch for CSS and Javascript, I need testing to be 100% reliable.
Also does IE9 have a similar feature going down to IE7?
It’s not going to be 100% reliable, I can tell you that right now. The only way to really test on IE7 is to test on IE7. For most layout checks, using the newer browser in emulation mode will be fine, but there are definitely bugs and oddities in the actual older browsers that the newer browsers don’t mimic faithfully.