Cache busting does not work in IE8

I am using the legacy version of steal. Whenever I use cache busting as follows:-

1. steal = {
2.       suffix : 'xyz'
3. };

It fails in IE8. This happens when running in dev mode. I haven't tried in prod mode. Read some people had raised this issue 2 yrs back too. Has this been resolved? Or some workaround. Note that I won't be using steal.production.js in prod environment for quite some time.

Thanks,

Karan