I see a lot of reports online that Bootstrap 3 is not correctly displaying on IE 8, for example two side-by-side columns get displayed full-width and stacked (instead of side-by-side).

If you’ve already added the required IE8 patch shown below, be sure you are adding that after the bootstrap.css file is loaded. (If you load it before boostrap.css it will not work.)

<!-- [if lt IE 9]>
<script src="https://oss.maxcdn.com/html5shiv/3.7.2/html5shiv.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://oss.maxcdn.com/respond/1.3/respond.min.js"></script>
< ![endif]-->