We need to test a website in both IE6 and IE7. We've had bugs appear running on actual windows machines that aren't visible under vmware (?!), so we have an actual windows laptop to do this - but only one. Is it possible to install IE6 and IE7 side-by-side in such a way that they absolutely, positively, behave exactly like they would if there was only one of them? How?
The officially sanctioned way is to use the microsoft-provided Virtual PC installation and VPC images. You don't need additional windows licenses to run these.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/11/30/ie6-and-ie7-running-on-a-single-machine.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=6D58729D-DFA8-40BF-AFAF-20BCB7F01CD1&displaylang=en
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en
Take a look at http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE. Bear in mind that running both side by side is not supported by Microsoft (http://blogs.msdn.com/cwilso/archive/2006/02/01/522281.aspx) and there's no guarantee that they will work absolutely fine side by side - a Windows Update could easily break something and sometimes people find conditional comments don't work properly amongst other things. All I can suggest is you give it a go and see how you get on.
The only really reliable way I've found is to use Virtual PC and have an image with IE6 on it, Multiple IE or IETester don't always work exactly the same as the original versions
If you can publish your pages on the web, you can try http://browsershots.org/
I always use it when I have to test a new layout with almost any browser on the planet.
Virtual PC 2007 is the latest version of VPC. You should use the newer version if you're running Windows Vista. VPC 2004 isn't supported for Vista.
Download page for Virtual PC 2007 SP1
Microsoft Virtual VPC Homepage where you can find the latest version of VPC
Related
I'm using Microsoft Remote Desktop App on my Mac which is connected to my microsoft account in order to test for "IE Technical Preview" which is IE11.
Is it possible to test for IE10 with this App as well?
Kind Regards,
Matt
I like this solution
https://github.com/xdissent/ievms
With one command it brings to your computer ready-to-use virtual machines with different versions of IE. Very useful for me.
It doesn't seem so. However, you should be able to select and download a virtual machine image from modern.ie.
The UI of the site dynamically adapts to your OS, so use it to get a sense of what's available to you. (The release notes refer to VMWare Fusion, VirtualBox, and Parallels. Hopefully, one of those is available to you.)
Hope this helps...
-- Lance
Someone smart who I know just mentioned that the idea of downloading Internet Explorer onto a Mac seems counterintuitive, even though it might make sense to do since Safari seems to have problems on a certain site for a project we're working on. I'm just wondering why this is and would greatly appreciate any clarification. In summary:
Why does it not make sense to download Internet Explorer onto a Mac?
Much thanks in advance!
If you're looking for a serious answer:
The best way to test something with IE7 for Windows is to use IE7 for Windows. Just because you have a Mac doesn't mean you can't do that. You can run Windows through BootCamp. Or buy a used $99 Windows box and borrow the Mac's keyboard/mouse/etc. Of course it's much more convenient, and almost certainly good enough, to run Windows in a VM under OS X via Parallels, VMware, etc. Wine will mostly work, but it can be fiddly to configure, and may crash and/or have visual glitches that don't happen with real Windows; if you really want to get serious about that you may want to look at Crossover.
But the next best way to test IE7 for Windows is actually Opera. Of course in the case of bugs and quirks that are still present in later versions of IE, they'll do a perfect job of emulating IE7, but for bugs that were fixed, that's not a particularly important focus. Opera, on the other hand, works hard to be able to emulate the quirks of all of the important browsers. Make sure to enable IE quirks mode, and set the user agent to pretend to be IE7 for Windows, and you should be golden.
But for the question you actually asked, there is no blanket answer to this that could possibly be correct. There are many reasons it may not make sense to download Internet Explorer onto a Mac, and also many reasons why it might.
You can't run IE for Mac on any modern Mac.
If you have an ancient Mac, and it's running 10.2 or 10.3 rather than 10.4, it already has IE (and if you want to reinstall it, it's part of the OS X install), so there's no reason to download IE.
You also can't legally download IE for Mac from anywhere anymore (except as part of old versions of OS X).
And IE for Mac is actually far less like IE7 for Windows than any modern browser is.
You can't run IE for Windows (or Pocket IE for Windows Mobile) on Mac OS X.
But you can run it under wine.
And you can run it in a virtual machine running Windows.
Except that Windows comes with Internet Explorer, so there's no reason to download it.
Unless your Windows comes with an older version and you want to update it.
And a Mac can run Windows instead of OS X if you want (e.g., via BootCamp).
Same caveats as with a VM.
And there may be other reasons to download it other than running it.
If your Mac has access to a fast internet connection and your Windows box doesn't, you might want to download the installer on the Mac to copy it locally to Windows.
Sometimes you just want to use up internet bandwidth.
Maybe you're testing your download speeds.
Maybe you're about to dump your boyfriend, and first you want to run him $300 over his monthly bandwidth limits.
Someone at Microsoft might find it entertaining when they notice in the logs that you've downloaded IE on a Mac, and it's always nice to bring a smile to a stranger's face.
The last version of Internet Explorer for Macintosh was 5.2, out in 2003. It wouldn't even run on a modern machine. The build is just not compatible.
If you want to try a different browser, both Chrome and Firefox run on OSX.
To run internet explorer on the Mac, you'd need to use some sort virtualization, running Windows either through Boot Camp or Parallels.
I had to do it because I'm developing software and the client wants to have it styled for IE 7 (the version they have on all their machines).
If I had my druthers, I'd run it under virtualization (e.g., VMWare), but I've misplaced my old XP CDs, so I settled for Wine (which works 'okay', but crashes from time-to-time).
I suggest using VirtualBox which would enable you to run MSIE on your Mac directly:
https://www.virtualbox.org/
...and here are the VMs for MSIE 6, 7, 8 and 9:
https://github.com/xdissent/ievms
Good luck!
It's definitely not a good idea to install Internet Explorer for Mac. It simply doesn't work properly as it was discontinued by Microsoft in 2005. However, if you have to use it to view certain websites that will only work in IE, this is the easiest way to download and install it for Mac: http://machow2.com/download-internet-explorer-for-mac/
I want to implement websites using a computer that is running only Ubuntu.
This is not feasible because Ubuntu FireFox displays completely different from Windows FireFox.
This means that I can do things like JS & PHP on Ubuntu, but have to switch to my Windows Computer to (edit and) view HTML & CSS as they appear for most users.
This makes file management too complicated. I have two of everything. And...I don't want to install a server on my Windows machine.
Is there any browser that looks remotely similar between Ubuntu and Windows? I want to stay on Ubuntu as much as possible.
Following the advice from Greg, why don't you install wine and run Internet Explorer from that?
use Wine to run a windows based browser to work with: http://www.winehq.org/
If its layouts and stuff you're worried about have a look at http://browsershots.org/ it allows you to see what a website looks like on many revisions of many browsers on BSD, Linux, Windows and Mac
I have to say you are working on the total wrong idea.
I can easily switch between 20 different themes. I'm currently using either an old Win2000 theme or the olive WinXP theme.
The only way for a non Desktop GUI app is to make your website look good on any computer.
Use CSS to style the input elements. Or better - make the GUI simple enough that the look of the common GUI form controls do not matter.
Everything else should work exactly the same anyway cause the layout engines for Firefox Linux and Firefox Windows are the same.
Google Chrome took special care to look the same on all platforms for font-rendering, etc. But I haven't noticed anything problematic on firefox, either. Have you installed msttcorefonts on ubuntu? That should help.
I agree with Greg. The simplest problem from one OS to another is fonts. While you can installed Microsoft licenced fonts in linux out of the box this isn't the default eg. Arial.
Even then just look at Safari for windows verusus Safari for Mac. Apple has their own implementation of the licenced MS fonts, as such the same font (eg arial) on Windows is not the same as on Mac. This can also be the case on linux if a slightly different implementation of the font is installed.
That aside, all the chrome ( toolbars, buttons, titlebar etc ) are different from one OS to another, so if you're a good developer and try really hard to word your content and fit your layout so that most people don't have to scroll just for two or three lines, then without actually viewing the page in the target OS you're really just doing half the job.
If you can get your head around it, try something like virtualbox and have a set of virtual machines, which you can run one at a time and test fully how each browser will work with your pages. A few things to note: as much as we ALL hate IE6, if your sites are going to be viewed by a company / organisation, chances are they'll still be on IE6, even worse is that there are TWO versions on IE6 which do operate slightly differently, notiable IE6 from XP ( no service packs installed ) and IE6 from XP SP2. Then you've got the default install that is Vista with IE7 ( which can look different and operate differently to IE7 on XP), and the default install in Win7 which is IE8. REALLY importantly is that it is known that some CSS on IE8 in XP is different to IE8 on Vista or Win7.
We (unfortunately) have as part of our testing 7 Win vm's to test just IE, then two for Firefox on windows ( FF 3.0 and 3.x - the latest ) plus two vms for Chrome and two vms for Safari on windows. Admittedly we promise our sites will work on all these browsers in our projects if the client chooses to at an additional cost.
Good luck
Fonts and platform form controls are likely reasons that you're going to see things differ between Linux and Windows. But they can also cause differences between different Windows users or different Linux users, so testing on a single Windows machine isn't necessarily sufficient either. If you're seeing drastic differences between Linux and Windows, it might be a sign that there are things in your design that are unnecessarily dependent on particular text widths or form control sizes.
I've developed some Java applications and wrapped them in exe files, some of them require JDIC files, the apps run on Windows systems, since my PC is all setup for development, it has all the necessary parts, but if a user downloads and runs my apps, they may not work as I thought. So I wonder if there is any place online that I can upload my apps and try to run them in a Windows environment and see if they work in the simulation ?
Frank
Consider using VirtualPC. You can get licensing for free.
Also you can get images from MS site for various versions of Windows to test with - supposedly for browser compatibility but you can use them for other things (which may or may not violate the EULA).
Consider using VMWare Workstation. You can get licensing for free.
You could use Amazon's EC2 instances to get easy access to virtual Windows machines. There is a bit of set up involved, but once you've done that you can spin up new machines easily enough. There are a number of tutorials online.
However, doing it locally with virtual windows instances is going to be even easier. I'd second VMware workstation or player.
You can download trial Windows server images directly from Microsoft for free.
I have a need to run IE6 on my Vista machine that natively runs IE7.
Can someone please help me with set-up / configuration steps?
Thanks,
Dan
Take a look at IETester -- it allows you to test pages in IE 5.5 - 8b2.
Try ie6eolas_nt.zip from http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/32bit/standalone . I use it on XP; haven't tried Vista.
Just use http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/
You can run older version of IE in Vista and Windows 7 :)
If you have IE7 installed, using Multiple IE's will let you install past versions without any conflicts.
Multiple IE does not work on Vista, you are stuck using a VM of sorts for full IE support. This is critical if you need to test your javascript or debug through CSS.
I managed to use AndLinux + Wine to get this working, but honestly I think the VMWare/Virtual PC/Virtual Box route is simpler.
I've used the multiple IE, but it has javascript problems which aren't their in the normal version.
The IE team advices to use the Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Images. These are virtual pc images with different IE versions.
Supported versions:
IE6 on XP SP3
IE7 on VISTA
IE7 on XP SP3
IE8B2 on XP SP3
For other IE versions you could make your own virtual image.