I know IE8 has been around for a while, and there are many questions about similar problems. Solution not found in other questions thought I did add some nice ideas from other questions. Like don't use $.getJSON in IE and always use cache: false in IE8 calls.
So question is why does this do not work in IE8?
Did a for ... in loop but tried also to just alert inside the callback function and nothing. Feels like the ajax never gets fired...
jsFiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/cmx0yfy8/show
Only code in the page (besides loading jQuery in head):
$.ajax({
        url:"https://rawgit.com/umpirsky/country-list/master/country/cldr/en/country.json",
        cache: false,
        dataType: "json"
    }).done(function (data) {
         for (code in data){
        $('body').append('<div>' + code + '</div>'); 
    }; 
});
 
     
     
     
    