How in the Tech

Easily Test Websites in All IE Versions

By Adam Myers ⋅ November 21, 2008 ⋅ Tags: Internet Explorer

Microsoft Internet Explorer is a thorn in every web developers side. While I would never consider myself to be one, there are times that I dabble in the wonderful world of CSS. IE is lambasted by most everyone for it’s complete disregard to any sort of web standards. For the most part, end users don’t care about this and it’s only because of proper due diligence of the web developers that end users don’t realize this. Web developers must test their designs across all the popular browsers: Firefox, Opera, and IE. Such is the life when you are the dominant browser.

On the surface, while annoying, this isn’t a huge deal because generally all the browsers can be installed side by side and ran concurrently. I say generally because ironically, only one version of IE can be installed at a time. Big deal? Ironically it is as Microsoft has two different non-standards compliant rendering engines in IE6 and IE7 (and soon a third with IE8)!

There is some hope though and it comes in the form of IETester, a free web browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE8, IE7, IE 6, and IE 5.5 on Vista and XP. The tab driven interface can actually display a website in different versions of IE in separate tabs – you are able to see the website in both browsers at the same time. While it is not all peachy – some things such as Flash, Java, or more advanced scripts produce some problems – the end result is highly useful for web developers and fakers such as myself.