I'm using angular.js and have trouble with IE8.
It redirects my site from examplepage.local/the/path to examplepage.local/#/the/path and shows a blank page.
I've activated the HTML5Mode
$locationProvider.html5Mode(false);
It works fine in browsers like chrome or firefox.
In the documentation for angular it says: "Opening a regular URL in a legacy browser -> redirects to a hashbang URL", so this seems to be the expected behaviour.
However, there's some information for you here. One guy did actually solve it and posted a snippet for it.