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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."
No the IE tab extension is not specific to IE6 and will therefore run IE7 in a Firefox tab if IE6 is installed. There's various hacks to run IE6 and IE7 side by side and they're not approved by MS so it's possible that you could be running IE6 with some IE7 libraries and then the result would not be a perfect IE6 install and some things may differ.
I just learnt this from the German IT news site heise.de http://www.heise.de/newsticker/foren/go.shtml?read =1&msg_id=11722667&forum_id=109109
On following sites you can test your webpage via an online renderer
For IE 6 and 7: http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/
For Safari: http://www.danvine.com/icapture/
For Firefox and many others: http://browsershots.org/
hth
Prior to the release by Microsoft of this VM image I got round the legal requirement to buy an extra XP licence by running XP with IE6 and running the free to download (at the time) betas of Vista in a virtual machine for IE7 testing.
If you want to test for compatibility with Safari, then you may want to try Konquerer. They have the same code base AFAIK. However, I've found a few differences between the two browsers, but it's probably about as close as you're going to get to Safari without buying a Mac. If you have a team of developers, and the all need access to one MAC, you can have multiple users logged into a single computer, each with their own VNC session, which means that multiple developers can use the same computer at the same time. Basically you log in each user with fast user switching, and each user starts a VNC Process on a different port. The only downside is that the users have to be logged in again and the VNC process restarted each time the computer is restarted. But I find that if you're just testing Websites, you don't need to restart your computer very much.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Oh well that would have been nice would it not? Generally speaking, I still develop for FF and IE6 with compliant code and I have yet to have a problem in IE7 when I do that. It seems like IE7 pretty much renders the same as FF2 on all of the major CSS classes. When you get into some of the crazier things then you need to be looking much more carefully. By the look of all my sites stats though, we will all be developing for IE6 for at least 2 years and even then a safari-esque %age will still be using IE6.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
Mod parent up! I have to wonder if some of the mods even have a basic understanding of English. Pointing out that this wonderful IE6 & IE7 testing system that is such a boon to "web developers" is actually only good for web developers who have Windows is stunningly on-topic.
Personally, I make sure my sites work in Firefox and then field any complaints I might get from the minority of IE6 people I have to deal with by encouraging them to install Firefox. If that's a no go, then I'll actually bother to track down a winbox and hack it to work with IE6 (as I'm really in no mood to shell out $200 to MS just to muck with their subpar browser).
So far, that's been working well. I suspect that the FF installed base is larger than the numbers would indicate... obviously that's at least the case for the base I deal with.
Trust me. This is an inactive account. Regardless of what the
Or you can just download IE3 / IE4 / IE5 /IE6 here, and run it without the need to install anything.
I have no idea if this is legal or anything, but i do know that it's a very simple solution that works...
Without having to use a virtual machine, here's how to install multiple versions of IE on a single machine: Multiple IE.
You must be confused...
There is a Firefox extension (maybe more) called IE Tab that will allow Firefox to use IE rendering engine in one tab. Pretty cool for testing.
However, as far as I know, IE Tab and all other similar extensions, will use whatever IE engine is available on the system (mshtml.dll I think). It's precisely because of the way IE works and it's integrated in the OS that you can't have multiple versions of IE installed at once.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
Too bad W3C Validators dont work correctly.
And unlike some imaginary world you wish us to build websites for, in this world most users use IE. Websites are built for users, not webmasters. So a webmaster must make sure that his website is rendered correctly on the user's computer and keep the ideology to himself or find another job.
My Starcraft 2 Blog
Exactly zero of the dozens of web developers I know use Macs. They all use Windows or Linux. They actually develop programs that generate websites, usually in .NET, Java, PHP, etc.
Only the web designers I know use Macs. Graphic/web designers are not the same developers, despite what they may think. They generally have the ability to make sites pretty, and tweak the layouts generated by the programs developers create. Most designers cannot build software at any reasonable level of compentency.
Huge problems arise when designers try to act as developers, and of course vice-versa. People with good skills in both areas are extremely rare. It isn't 1997 anymore. Back then, the ability to generate pretty HTML and graphics made you a "webmaster." But the bar has been raised. These days, any good website needs both good developers (programmers) and good graphic/UI designers.
But anyway, I think you probably meant "web developers" := "people that make the site look good," rather than "people that build the logic behind the website." But in most job postings I've seen, "developer" very specifically means programmer, while "designer" means UI layout and graphics work.
This is idiot.
All that apps that use IE could still use the version that comes with the OS,
and let me install another version under a separate path.
On Unix only the amateurish programs have hardwired paths, ports and shared library
versions; or insist to be installed or run as root - it's completely ridiculous that
you tout this idiocy as a feature of Windows and MSIE.
To put it nicely, you could not be more wrong.
Most web developers (coders), as well as web designers (graphics/layout), use Windows and test in IE6. They'd be crazy not to, considering the large 85%+ of web users that use IE, and all the tweaking necessary to get sites to look right in IE6.
Additionally, a larger percentage of web developers design sites first in Firefox compared to the rest of the population*. No more than 20-30%, but that's higher than the 10-15% of everybody else. Even then, with those developers focusing on standards, they follow up with tweaking for IE6. Meaning they still use Windows (2000/XP) for that.
* See W3Schools.com's stats for one example