IE6, IE7 & IE8 running in OSX

IE3 - IE8 under VMWare

The Problem

So here goes my first real blog post on here, I’ve not done this before so bare with me…

When designing this site I set out to make it as clean as possible, using no images within the main structure layout of the site and as always keep it standards compliant, keeping the structure and design of the site as separate as possible.

One thing all web developers/designers should come across at one point in their adventures is cross browser compatibility, it should be no problem and many modern browsers will render pages very similarly as long as the site rendering uses good standards compliant code. Unfortunately the most popular browser of the time is Internet Explorer, which is inherently poor at adhering to any standards but Microsoft’s own.

VMWare

As a Mac user with no native windows machines available at home, I rely on a virtual machine to get by and recently switched from Parallels to VMWare. As part of the switch I decided to dump my crap-infested VM images and create a shiny new image of my main test bed, Windows XP.

Rather than use a vanilla install I decided to use a cutdown customised install, namely ‘Windows XP Performance Edition‘.  I chose to do this as I thought and have yet to be proved wrong, that the lower resources needed by this operating system would increase the speed and overall stability of my aging first generation 24″ iMac. So far my assumptions appear to be correct and I can see a big difference in comparison to my old Parallels install, how much of this is down to VMWare and the freshness of the install I am unsure.

The Browsers

Getting the required browsers needed for thorough testing is a real pain with the introduction of Internet Explorer 8. Microsoft by default do not allow the existence of multiple versions of Internet Explorer to be installed in any one instance of their Windows operating system. So the following steps are relevant to Windows users as well as they will allow any user of XP (and possibly Vista?) to attain multiple instances of the blessed browser!

First of all upgrade the native version of Internet Explorer installed to the 8.0 Beta. Next thing to do is to go here , scroll to the bottom and choose the download method of your choosing for the Internet Explorer 7.0 installation. This installation required me to restart, I do not know if this is a standard thing or not.

After this is installed you now have IE 8.0 and IE 7.0 installed side by side, which is good but for full testing coverage IE 6.0 is required. To acquire the remaining browsers I used the Multiple IE installer available from Tredosoft, this install went without a hitch and all browsers work fine, albeit the rendering is poor for modern sites in versions five and below.

Alternatives for OSX

For quick little tests I tend to use a port of ie4linux, cleverly named ie4osx. I thought I would throw this in case anybody who may actually stumble upon this post has never heard of it, as it doesn’t often get shouted about as a solution.