AngularJS and IE 8

I need to support IE within desktop applications and MS sent XML data islands to the grave. XML data islands were an undervalued technology, particularly for databinding. Data islands are supported in later versions of IE through a backwards compatibility mode but that doesn't help with Chrome.

So naturally the gap gets filled and while there are many contenders it looks like AngularJS is the overall winner because you get so much out of the box. Why MS couldn't have done something similar is beyond me.
So AngularJS can run in IE and Chrome, but there's a catch. The following runs in Chrome but not in IE.

After lots of searching I found that you need this:

at the top of the HTML. It occurs when you are using AngularJS with Strict Contextual Escaping (SCE) mode enabled (the default) on IE8 or lower in quirks mode.