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Microsoft Makes Testing IE6 and 7 Easier

Posted by Zonk on from the was-keeping-me-up-at-night dept.

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."

2 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Don't test sites on browsers by gaspyy · · Score: 1, Redundant

    I wish the real world was that easy.

    Have you ever designed something for a major company?

    You can't get away with designing for standards and ignoring everything else.

    Case in point, I maintain the site for a health insurance provider. One of their customer (also a major corporation) was having troubles managing their account online. They sent a screenshot. It was a javascript error; the browser was IE4 running in 16bit color. The error was due to the fact that one of the programmers had used getElementById() without checking first if it's supported; he thought since 99% use IE6 or firefox or opera, who cares about IE4?

    Usually I make sure everything I do works in IE7, IE6, IE5, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

  2. Re:Write code for standards not for Virtual Machin by hr.wien · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Running an entire separat machine to test on is less hassle than having a few VMs running? What world are you living in?

    Personally I develop on a Linux box with Windows 2000/XP/Vista (IE5.5/6/7 + different versions of other browsers on Windows) running in VMWare. This allows me to code in my environment of choice (Linux), and test in just about any browser in existance, on several different platforms. All on the same box. (With the exception of Mac-based browsers of course, since I haven't been able to get Tiger to run in VMWare.)