Multiple versions of Internet Explorer on one machine

When designing pages for multiple browsers. It’s pretty much a pain in the ass to get things looking similar cross all browsers. There are many Javascript libraries to help and ease the pain. But it doesn’t solve all. And hoping people will stop using IE 6 also doesn’t really help. So we are stuck in getting things work in all those quirky browsers. So a developer / designer probably has multiple browsers installed. On my dev box i only use Firefox.

But when i have to build a design. I need to check al those browsers. So i have Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer installed. The problem with internet explorer is that you can’t run multiple versions on the same machine. Well at least not without a long hacking session. To solve this problem most of the time i used something like Virtual Machine or Virtual Desktop. The problem is that applications like that eat memory. And there is always the minor annoyances with losing focus on my IDE because the VM window is still active.

Some time ago. My coworker Bart send a link to a tool called IETester. This nice little (24mb) tool let’s you run multiple versions of Internet explorer on one machine. It’s possible to test pages in version 5.5 and up. even the upcomming (still in beta) version 8 is supported. At the time of writing it is still in alpha stage. But it works great. I did have some unexplainable crashes. And there are some known issue’s like:

• When resizing, the content may disappear. I am working to correct it on the next version.
• The Previous/Next buttons are not working properly
• Focus is not working properly
• Java applets are not working
• Flash is not working on IE6 instance.

Besides that it does what it’s build for. A nice tool to add to your arsenal.