Differences among IEs on Win XP/Win 7/Win 8

Question

I am testing a quite complex webapp and since I only have Win 8 in VMware I am using IE10 and its develepmont tools to run it in compatible mode. But the exact behavior (performace especially) differs from the "same browser" (IE8/vs IE10 with compatibility mode on) running on Win 7 and on Win XP though.

Does anybody have solution for that? I really do not want to have tons of VM on my drive.

Are those differences described somewhere?

Answer 1

As I said in the comments:Yes, there are some significant differences between real versions of IE and their relevant compatibility modes. The best solution is to use a tool like IETester, which allows you to install multiple "real" versions of IE on the same machine.

IETester is a third-party program; it isn't a standard part of IE's tools, and it doesn't use the "compatibility modes"; it uses the real rendering engines for each version of IE.

It basically installs separate copies of the real IE6/7/8/9 rendering engines, and uses those to display sites. It isn't perfect -- it is prone to crashing quite a lot, and it doesn't have the developer facilities that a real copy of IE has, so it's not much good for general debugging, but for checking how the site looks in each version of IE, there is nothing better (except having a bunch of VMs, which you already ruled out).

Hope that helps.