Dev Tools: Modern IE
by ejk
One of the most challenging aspects of web development is making sure your site works on multiple platforms. Firefox and Chrome are available for most every system where you develop, but tracking down one of the different versions of Internet Explorer to try to reproduce a bug can be an exercise in frustration. Luckily, Microsoft has generously created Virtual Machines containing versions of Internet Explorer from the current IE 11 all the way back to IE 6, and made them freely available. These can run in another piece of freely available software, VirtualBox, which will run on your development system.
modern.IE currently provides the following Virtual Machines:
- IE 11 on Windows 8.1
- IE 10 on Windows 8
- IE 11 on Windows 7
- IE 10 on Windows 7
- IE 9 on Windows 7
- IE 8 on Windows 7
- IE 7 on Windows Vista
- IE 8 on Windows XP
- IE 6 on Windows XP
Getting all these Virtual Machines downloaded and installed properly can be difficult, but luckily there is a terminal script which will do the downloading and initial config for you. Running the bash script from the IEVMS repository on Github will automatically download all or just selected versions of the modern.IE VMs and get them installed in your VirtualBox. Just run the following command in a terminal:
curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | bashIf you've got VirtualBox up and running you can even see your new VMs being created and booted up by the script. Look at the IEVMS page for more information and options.
IEVMS https://github.com/xdissent/ievms
modern.IE Virtual Machines http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools
VirtualBox https://www.virtualbox.org/
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