Currently there are a variety of mw-core qunit tests that fail when run in IE8. We have declared IE8 to be a Grade-A supported browser, and as such we should be running CI tests against it. Obviously Windows is not something we run under our current infrastructure, additionally we have policies in place that restrict the usage of non-free software within the labs infrastructure.

It has been suggested we may be able to run these in saucelabs, my initial concern there would be that it may be too slow to use as part of the standard jenkins V+2, but i think it is important that we test not just one browser in qunit but also browsers that we know often turn up javascript inconsistencies.