Running IE6, 7 & 8 on Your Mac
As a web designer it’s extremely important to be able to test projects in multiple browsers. We want to try and ensure that people get the same experience whether they’re looking at a project in Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc. Now any web designer should be able to tell you that Internet Explorer is the biggest issue with our jobs. To be honest, if we didn’t have Internet Explorer things would be so much easier, in particular Internet Explorer 6. According to Wikipedia, IE6 was release in August of 2001. That’s more than 8 years ago! When you think about that in computer years, it’s a lifetime! So why are so many people still running IE6? I can’t answer that, but I can tell you for certain that when it comes to web development that tons and tons of money is wasted on making sites work in IE6!
Anyway, I’ll step off the soapbox now to get back to the point at hand. Being that we need to test our projects on multiple browsers, we need a way to do it! Rather than buying a PC that I don’t want, I simply run VMware Fusion on my Mac with Windows XP installed on it. Windows XP natively had IE6 installed on it which was perfect for me. If I had to choose one of the versions of IE to be able to test on, I would choose IE6 as the majority of the issues are found there. However, IE7 and IE8 both have their issues as well. And you can’t simply download all the versions and run them without some special programming. So that’s where this little trick comes into play. Thanks to the guys at Edskes, they’ve developed a great way to be able to run any version (all the way down to IE1) at the same time! All you need to do is get VMware Fusion running with Windows on it, go to the following address (you have to install it while in a browser in Window, you can’t install it straight onto your Mac), and download (it’s the link right below where it says Internet Explorer Collection with the light blue background) and install and you’re good to go! It’s the perfect solution!
Have a Thought? Leave Your Comment Here
Dave McFarland
15 Dec, 2009
You can also create multiple instances of Win XP in VMWare and upgrade the browser to IE 7 in one, and IE 8 in the other. That way you have 3 distinct windows setups with 3 separate browsers.
ClaudiuDesign
12 Feb, 2010
they should make an all in one browser tester for web designers so we can skip issues such as the one your taking about in this article. i’m sure there would be lots of buyers.
Stephen Reis
17 Feb, 2010
Yeah, IE6 is just a pain in the you know what, that we just decided to stop caring about it on our latest project. Or maybe its because we could afford not to since that website catered to other techies.
anyway, thanks for the link. I’ve always wanted to have only 1 other OS installation.
discount computer hardware
28 Feb, 2010
I do prefer IE 6, old version on my PC. it goes faster.
Curtis J
13 Nov, 2009
Great tip! Happy B-day by the way! ; )