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

Helping check compatibility is the right idea

[traindirector]

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.

Re:Helping check compatibility is the right idea

[CastrTroy]

If you want to test for compatibility with Safari, then you may want to try Konquerer. They have the same code base AFAIK. However, I've found a few differences between the two browsers, but it's probably about as close as you're going to get to Safari without buying a Mac. If you have a team of developers, and the all need access to one MAC, you can have multiple users logged into a single computer, each with their own VNC session, which means that multiple developers can use the same computer at the same time. Basically you log in each user with fast user switching, and each user starts a VNC Process on a different port. The only downside is that the users have to be logged in again and the VNC process restarted each time the computer is restarted. But I find that if you're just testing Websites, you don't need to restart your computer very much.

Re:Helping check compatibility is the right idea

[Fred_A]

Over 1/5 of traffic to my site is from Safari. The rest is Mozilla/Firefox. Less than one percent even use IE, from what I recall. That was a few months ago.

You have to be kidding. I have checked the stats from one of my sites at http://192.168.1.6/ and not only is all of the traffic from Firefox, it's all from Linux users. *And* they are all on the same machine (which is at 192.168.1.2). I have found the logs to be absolutely homogeneous for months.

So it is absolutely obvious to me that you are making your numbers up and inventing browser names. I await your apologies.

Re:Helping check compatibility is the right idea

[Magus424]

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.

What would be even better is if these so-called "web developers" actually learned how to properly override things for IE instead of relying on silly hacks.

Conditional comments for one are much more reliable.

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

I'm confused...

[PFI_Optix]

I can't seem to come up with a way to apply "It's a trap!", the borg, or a chair reference to this story.

I know...ITSAHOAX!

It must be...

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

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.

Re:IE6 Via FF Extensions?

[moore.dustin]

Oh well that would have been nice would it not? Generally speaking, I still develop for FF and IE6 with compliant code and I have yet to have a problem in IE7 when I do that. It seems like IE7 pretty much renders the same as FF2 on all of the major CSS classes. When you get into some of the crazier things then you need to be looking much more carefully. By the look of all my sites stats though, we will all be developing for IE6 for at least 2 years and even then a safari-esque %age will still be using IE6.

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.

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).

Re:More of a move against VMWare

[Thundersnatch]

The majority of web developers I know develop on the mac anyways.

Exactly zero of the dozens of web developers I know use Macs. They all use Windows or Linux. They actually develop programs that generate websites, usually in .NET, Java, PHP, etc.

Only the web designers I know use Macs. Graphic/web designers are not the same developers, despite what they may think. They generally have the ability to make sites pretty, and tweak the layouts generated by the programs developers create. Most designers cannot build software at any reasonable level of compentency.

Huge problems arise when designers try to act as developers, and of course vice-versa. People with good skills in both areas are extremely rare. It isn't 1997 anymore. Back then, the ability to generate pretty HTML and graphics made you a "webmaster." But the bar has been raised. These days, any good website needs both good developers (programmers) and good graphic/UI designers.

But anyway, I think you probably meant "web developers" := "people that make the site look good," rather than "people that build the logic behind the website." But in most job postings I've seen, "developer" very specifically means programmer, while "designer" means UI layout and graphics work.

Re:More of a move against VMWare

[ben there...]

The majority of web developers I know develop on the mac anyways.

To put it nicely, you could not be more wrong.

Most web developers (coders), as well as web designers (graphics/layout), use Windows and test in IE6. They'd be crazy not to, considering the large 85%+ of web users that use IE, and all the tweaking necessary to get sites to look right in IE6.

Additionally, a larger percentage of web developers design sites first in Firefox compared to the rest of the population*. No more than 20-30%, but that's higher than the 10-15% of everybody else. Even then, with those developers focusing on standards, they follow up with tweaking for IE6. Meaning they still use Windows (2000/XP) for that.

* See W3Schools.com's stats for one example

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.

Why bother? MS should use Opera or Firefox instead

[SgtChaireBourne]

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.

Re:Boot Camp

[traindirector]

You could, of course, use Apple's Boot Camp to install XP and then install Virtual PC onto XP.

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.

Don't test sites on browsers

[Stormwatch]

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

Re:Don't test sites on browsers

[gsnedders]

The validator isn't perfect. Checking it manually against the specifications used is the only way to ensure compliance.

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.

Re:Don't test sites on browsers

[NineNine]

You obviously don't pay your bills with web development.

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.

Download IE6 standalone

[u2boy_nl]

Or you can just download IE3 / IE4 / IE5 /IE6 here, and run it without the need to install anything.

I have no idea if this is legal or anything, but i do know that it's a very simple solution that works...

*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?

Multiple IE Installs on a single machine

[rainer3]

Without having to use a virtual machine, here's how to install multiple versions of IE on a single machine: Multiple IE.

Re:Why bother? MS should use Opera or Firefox inst

[mrchaotica]

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?

Now just admit that it's NOT part of the OS...

[bADlOGIN]

(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?

Website

[Z34107]

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.