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

web developers?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is all-around excellent news for web developers.

For WINDOWS web developers, that is. Still no way to run IE7 in wine, AFAIK

IE6 Via FF Extensions?

[moore.dustin]

If you have IE7 and FF2, can you test for IE6 through a Firefox extension. I know it is possible with just FF2 and IE6, but I am not sure if the extension uses whatever version of IE you have installed or if is made to be IE6. Thanks for any input

More of a move against VMWare

[unPlugged-2.0]

I think this is more of a move towards VMWare than it is for helping out Web Developers.

Let's look at why? The majority of web developers I know develop on the mac anyways. I don't see why Microsoft would really care so much about this niche crowd who always beat up on MS. No - What this does is it gives them an opportunity to gain some favor in the community and also push another product which microsoft is so good at doing.

Not being paranoid but I am just thinking about what makes sense for Microsoft as a business. They really want to push VirtualPC and you can see this in their partnerships with Xen and the feeling that they are loosing massive market share to VMWare (which they are btw).

So this is more of a counter with the guise of backward compatibility.

If they really wanted to help out Web Developers they would have simply included a IE6 mode in IE7 as an update that lets you switch between the rendering engines. I am sure this would be possible and also much easier to a web developer.

Re:More of a move against VMWare

[tlhIngan]

Of course if the main purpose was to ensure as many people could test IE7 as possible they'd also make a VMWare compatible image so Mac and Linux users could test. However, ultimately that probably is too much to ask as it'd give Linux and Mac users a free time limited licence for XP, they ultimately want people to develop primarily on Windows so that'd never happen.

Isn't the Virtual PC hard drive image format open (really open - royalty free, do-anything-you-want)? In which case, all VMWare has to do is really just support .vhd files in their drive emulation (and every other piece of software that wants to run the image, e.g., bochs, qemu, plex86, etc). Just like VMWare opened their disk image format, Virtual PC has as well (and I believe the image formats are derived from the original VirtualPC (MacOS) version... so while Virtual PC/Windows and Virtual PC/MacOS (PowerPC) are completely different products, they use compatible formats).

*Free* XP images?

[cbhacking]

So wait... if I'm understanding this correctly, the idea here is free images of XP. Sure, they probably won't work in anything except VirtualPC, but they are still free copies of XP! I thought the whole rationale behind making VPC free was to drive adoption of virtualization, resulting in more Windows licenses sold...

Are they *fully functional* versions? I.E. can you install other software (there's a decent supply of XP-only software that won't even run in W2K)? The summary suggests you can upgrade the browser, which is a big step by itself... but I have a few friends who haven't upgraded to W2K for various reasons, and still run W2K. Does this new download mean they would be able to use XP (within W2K) without needing to buy an XP license?

Re:Don't test sites on browsers

[traindirector]

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

I'm hoping the parent was aiming to be modded Funny. Writing HTML and CSS that complies with web standards is easy. Making sites that render correctly in the browsers that 98% of Internet users is wherein comes one of the major challenges in web design.

My general strategy is to spend a certain amount of time writing compliant XHTML 1.1, then spending 5 times that amount of time making it work in IE. This is not atypical.

Unless you're doing a really simple site, browser checks are the mark of success. Passing the W3C validation at the end is like a ticker tape parade celebrating the fact that you complied to web standards while somehow getting it to render correctly in IE.