Testing Sites in IE on a Mac

I have been working on a project recently that has really got me deep into the world of XHTML and CSS. Honestly, I have fallen in love with the standards, but at the same time I have been able to experience first-hand the frustrations of browser [in]compatibility (namely Internet Explorer).

Microsoft quit developing IE for Mac way back around version 5.5. For me that creates a predicament when trying to fully test my work across all the most common browsers, the top of which is my nemesis Internet Explorer. You would hope that validating your code with W3 would be good enough to ensure consistent rendering across all the mainstream browsers, but experience has dictated otherwise.

Sure there are browser compatibility testing solutions out there, but more often than not these services become flooded and respond slowly to your requests. Additionally, they usually respond with screenshots which limit your debugging to what you can see only. Also, I found ies4osx, but I really feared that they may not provide a true representation of how it would look in IE under windows. Oh yeah, and it wouldn’t run on my computer…

I don’t know, maybe I’m old fashioned, maybe I’m inexperienced, but I like to bring up the source, make changes, and see how those changes are represented in the browser causing my problem. The good thing is between Mac OS X and Windows XP we can pretty much cover all our browser bases, BUT the big problem is the various version of IE that are in heavy use and Windows’ inability to install multiple versions together on one install of the OS. There are some potential ways of making this work, but I didn’t have much luck with them early on, and honestly I didn’t want to fool with Windows for any length of time.

SO here’s what I did. I downloaded VirtualBox from Sun Microsystems (VirtualBox is a great FREE computer virtualization software available for server platforms). I then created a VM with a base install of Windows XP SP2. I patched out the Windows install as far as I could WITHOUT updated IE past version 6 (!) and without installing SP3. This gave me a solid basic install of Windows with IE6 for testing my sites (~4.34 GB so far)

Step 2! At this point I would like a VM with IE7 and one with IE8. I figured I could just copy the VM’s virtual disk and create a new VM and I would be all set. The problem with straight copying the VM is VirtualBox serializes it’s virtual disks so it will not allow you to simply copy the “vdi” file without conflicting with your existing virtual disk. With a little research I came up with the command line utilities VirtualBox packages. Here is how to use it:

VBoxManage clonevdi [source] [dest]


Super simple! So I cloned it twice and updated / installed as needed so I would end up with three VMs: Window XP IE6, Windows XP IE7, and Windows XP IE8! (4.34 GB + 4.62 GB + 3.99 GB = 12.95 GB Total)

Ugh, the hard drive sacrifice for this method completely blows, but honestly this ended up being the easiest way for me to get good solid tests out of all the browsers I wanted.

Side note: If you already have VMs under Parallels and you’re looking to migrate to other solutions, I happened across this blurb about just that during my research. Maybe it will be helpful…