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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.
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...
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
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.
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.
Software Defined RFID - The Rifidi Emulator
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
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.
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.
Test your sites on the W3C's validators . That's the only testing you should EVER do.
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.
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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