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

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.