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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."
What would have really been good news for web developers would have been if Microsoft had gone a bit further with the standards support and not broken a number of methods developers used to trick IE6.
That being said, reaching out a hand to the web development community like this is a great move on Microsoft's part. It will encourage developers to test for both IE6 and IE7 even if they couldn't normally run both (or either). I would imagine this would be enormously useful for Mac developers who don't want to buy a PC (as I imagine it would work for Mac Virtual PC).
On that subject, I've been wondering why Apple doesn't release a test kit for Safari. I would test against Safari even though it doesn't have a large market share. I test against Opera. I even make sure my pages degrade gracefully in Netscape 4 and IE and Netscape 3. But I'm not going to buy a Mac just to make sure my pages look okay to Mac users. I know 98% of the time Safari will display like Firefox or Opera, but there are noticeable exceptions (especially in styling forms). Wouldn't helping people verify web page compatibility be an opportunity for Apple to ensure the compatibility of their platform?
I think Microsoft has the right idea here.
Maybe MS is somehow is benefiting from the endless cycles of MSIE-based spyware, viruses, and general security problems. If not, then it (and we) would be much better off if MS should drop MSIE completely. Where does MS come out ahead financially? MSIE is probably the largest single public relations problem as well as one of largest security and productivity problems that MS produces these days.
The Netscape/DOJ v MS has been over for years. MSIE wastes our time, it wastes MS time. There's simply no need for anyone, even MS, to be wasting resources with MSIE. The public certainly has no reason to let MS foist on them such low quality security hole masquerading as a useful application. Drop MSIE or let users uninstall it completely.
Firefox and Opera are what people are using anyway. Go with the flow and invest the resources that would have gone into trying to keep life in MSIE go somewhere they'll actually have a chance of doing good.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
And pull the XP license for the main XP install from magical fairy land?
Doing so would totally void the point of the package, which is to provide a free, licensed XP install in Virtual PC for web development.
Doesn't this invalidate WPA and all other copy protection crap with XP?
The validator isn't perfect. Checking it manually against the specifications used is the only way to ensure compliance.
Test your sites on the W3C's validators . That's the only testing you should EVER do.
Yes, but in the real world, explaining to your website visitors that microsoft doesn't follow web standards and that is why the website looks crappy to them doesn't go over very well with senior management.
If you're running a business, you need to test your website with browsers that have a large market share.
You obviously don't pay your bills with web development.
What's your point? Corporations could write intranet browser-based apps just as easily for Firefox -- and even get a better result, since they could make superior GUIs with XUL!
And before you start talking about preexisting apps, note that IE6 would still be around for legacy compatibility. Furthermore, MS doesn't seem to have a problem with changing toolkits (see: Win32 -> MFC -> WinForms), so why would it have a problem with changing the browser too?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
(since it isn't) and make it so you don't have to do stupid crap like this.
Lessie... memory management, process scheduling, storage, parsing & rendering HTML.
Which of these doesn't fit again?
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
Believe it or not, your site is hardly representative of the rest the internet's tubes.
Some people are paid to develop websites designed for a less limited group of users. Some, dare I say most websites, especially on corporate intranets, have some need to support Internet Explorer.
Microsoft made this easier, and they made it free. Seems like a Good Thing to me, even if you never plan on using it.
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