Microsoft Makes Testing IE6 and 7 Easier

davidmcg writes "Finally, Microsoft has made steps to make testing IE6 and IE7 easier for Windows users. Previously, you had to pay for an additional Windows license to legally run both versions of IE for testing purposes. Now Microsoft is making available free Windows XP/IE6 images available for VirtualPC (also free as MS is competing with VMWare). This means that you can run IE6 in a virtual machine while running IE7 on your host machine. The drawback is that the download is set to expire April 2007 ... although we are promised new versions will be released. What Microsoft doesn't mention is that Virtual PC also runs on Windows 2000 (and IE7 doesn't). Therefore it's possible to install this Windows XP VPC image on your Win2k machine. You can then update IE6 on the XP image to IE7, testing IE7 without upgrading from Win2k. This is all-around excellent news for web developers."

Comments

:C

[Anonymous Coward]

By making them just crash when you start them up, instead of making you wait for 30 seconds!

::ducks::

I'm confused...

[PFI_Optix]

I can't seem to come up with a way to apply "It's a trap!", the borg, or a chair reference to this story.

I know...ITSAHOAX!

It must be...

Don't test sites on browsers

[Stormwatch]

Test your sites on the W3C's validators . That's the only testing you should EVER do.

Re:Helping check compatibility is the right idea

[Fred_A]

Over 1/5 of traffic to my site is from Safari. The rest is Mozilla/Firefox. Less than one percent even use IE, from what I recall. That was a few months ago.

You have to be kidding. I have checked the stats from one of my sites at http://192.168.1.6/ and not only is all of the traffic from Firefox, it's all from Linux users. *And* they are all on the same machine (which is at 192.168.1.2). I have found the logs to be absolutely homogeneous for months.

So it is absolutely obvious to me that you are making your numbers up and inventing browser names. I await your apologies.