Big thanks to the people who made Microsoft create modern.IE. This is the path Microsoft should have taken many years ago and finally they've made a good decision by providing users of other operating systems a humane way to check IE's version of their pages.

In case someone's having the same problem I had with IE8 XP image for Virtualbox on Linux, namely that the VM was falling in a reboot loop during startup: for me the solution was to boot into the safe mode and delete C:\Windows\System32\drivers\intelppm.sys. I've found the solution here: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&amp;t=30490