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

Re:IE6 Via FF Extensions?

[linuxci]

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.

It's way easier

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Firefox is simpler

[davidmcg]

A few people have asked me if Firefox needs to be run in a virtual machine to test different versions. The answer to that is no, so I wrote a quick guide to how I run multiple versions of Firefox on the same machine.

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.

Re:IE6 Via FF Extensions?

[gaspyy]

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.

Re:Don't test sites on browsers

[Shohat]

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.