Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.
I believe that many of the IE8 and 9 problems people are posting are due to an error in the way the doctype is presented with the RDF module enabled.
I would replace the doctype designation there with !doctype html, per the abstract http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-in-html/, specifically the section 2.1 (Html5 and RDFa conformance).
I think this will fix many of the bugs you are seeing with IE8/9.
Thank you!