What's a good IE tester for Macs?

apple.stackexchange https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/5841

Question

I just moved to the Mac after years and permanently moved my PC out of my life at home. I am a graphic designer who builds web pages. I code pure XHTML pages with div layouts. But whenever you keep to web standards, you have to check out how it works on the most commonly-used browsers.

On the Mac, my default browser is Firefox (Chrome and Safari are also installed). But I cannot see the result of how my pages look in IE.

On a Mac, is there any way to test web designs on IE?

(IE for Mac is not supported by Microsoft any more, so I didn't download it. I've received several suggestions to use Boot Camp, but I don't want to install Windows.)

Was it helpful?

Solution

I understand you don't want to install Windows. However, thats what all Mac-users at our company do (with vmWare fusion).

OTHER TIPS

The most common ways I know of doing this:

  • Virtual testing:
    • BrowserCam
      Screen capture and Remote Access service for cross platform compatibility testing and HTML design quality assurance
    • Adobe BrowserLab
    • Browsershots
      Check Browser Compatibility, Cross Platform Browser Test

  • Your local library often has PCs available for patrons to use

  • Ask a buddy to test it/take screenshots for you (often, in return for you doing the same for them on the Mac)

Even if you had IE/Mac installed, it wouldn't help you any in this regard. It used a different rendering engine; one that no version of IE/Win has ever used.

There is a Way to use the regular IE7 and IE8 for Windows via Wine. A short German tutorial is available at http://www.webmasterpro.de/coding/article/internet-explorer-auf-mac-os-x-installieren.html.

If running a virtual machine isn't interesting, I think your best bet is to get a cheap PC with a Microsoft OS.

You can run it without a monitor and connect to it using Microsoft's free "Remote Desktop Connection" software so you don't have to physically type on a different machine to test things. There are a few different versions of IE you may wish to test. Microsoft has virtual-machine-based copies of their browsers for this purpose [1]. These images can't be run in a traditional VM on your Mac due to licensing problems. They will run on the cheap PC.

  1. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en

I've been using http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/index.php and it works well, though obviously not as good as vmWare. If I was working with webpages just a bit more often I would probably invest in a virtual windows-machine.

I would suggest a virtual environment so that you can clone your virtual machine to host different versions of IE on every virtual machine (at least IE version 7 and 8 need to be tested and version 9 is about to be released).

Beside the commercial offering (VMWare Fusion and Parallels) there are also open source projects like Virtual Box that you can use to start experimenting.

You'll need a valid Microsoft Windows XP or Windows 7 license so that you can install Windows on the virtual machine.

Regards Massimo

You don't. No IE-testing suite is completely accurate, and several will raise errors which don't appear in production (wasting your time on false positives). Virtual machines aren't as reliable as people think - I've seen several VM-specific bugs whilst trying to run IE6 (I think IE6's rendering engine relies on the coordination of certain threads, which VMs can't quite manage properly).

If IE6/7 functionality matters to your organization, I

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