Those of you that are web designers have likely grown a great disdain for Internet Explorer. IE is given, and rightly so, a ton of grief in this area because of Microsoft’s attitude towards following web standards. When a web browser is programmed to obey and render accurately to standards, a web designer can be reasonably sure that their layout and programming will function correctly. Internet Explorer, however, has always ventured slightly off the agreed upon path which often means web developers must typically work around the differences and provide logic exclusively for IE based browsers. Sounds pretty tedious and painful doesn’t it? It gets worse – with each version of Internet Explorer the path continues to diverge. Therefor, it is not uncommon for a web application to have multiple blocks of code to handle each iteration of Internet Explorer!

Ensuring your application works across all the browsers logically requires a good amount of testing. It’s a straightforward testing methodology to support Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Opera – they all can be installed on the same system without interfering with one another. Likewise, Internet Explorer plays along nicely with the alternative browsers but unfortunately is not overly kind to it’s brethren – that is to say, only one version of Internet Explorer can be installed and maintained in Windows. Testing IE7 vs IE8 metrics typically requires two computers or a somewhat complicated virtualization platform.

IETester is an amazingly free application that aims to simplify testing across different versions of Internet Explorer – all on the same computer without any complicated setup. IETester is able to render and display your design/application in IE5.5-8 simultaneously, without requiring installations of each version.

IETester is a breeze to use; if you are familiar with the Office 2007 ribbon you will be right at home. While it is considered beta-level software I had minimal stability issues on Windows 7. The lone requirement is your installed browser must at least be IE7. If you must deal with the existence of Internet Explorer you owe it to yourself to check out IETester.

Download IETester

Internet Explorer probably isn’t the biggest blunder for Microsoft. In fact, I’d argue it was extremely shrewd since IE was originally for-pay and then released for free to “compete” with Netscape. It’s no secret how that competition faired – IE removed a competitor from their market, their underlining strategy all along. If for no reason other than that, the profit vs. loss analysis does not hold weight here.

The biggest problem with IE is how intricately it is linked into the OS, which is why security exploits in IE are a huge nightmare for Microsoft. That being said, I think Dvorak is at least partially correct. If they used any other browser, they’d toss out at least half their security problems. They could point the finger, and shake their heads, and talk about how secure their system is and how, if they built a browser, it would be completely secure and oh-so-functional. Instead they look awful, and their browser is a technological fossil, even with IE7 on the horizon.

Everybody loves a free education …