Testing IE6 Sites With IE7 Installed

Hi Kirk,

I updated the post above to show a screenshot of both browsers running and using different rendering engines.

Dan.

The approach we have taken for testing in IE6 / IE7 on the same machine, is to build a virtual machine containing IE7 (using Microsoft Virtual PC) - and having IE6 installed on our actual development machines.

We then do all IE7 testing using the virtual machine.

There were some issues with this method:

1/ Its time consuming to set up - but having set up one virtual machine you can roll it out to all your developers with minimal configuration changes.

2/ All of our development is done against a local web server (localhost) and settings are loaded dynamically dependant on the hostname. All development machines are set up identically, so each application has a configuration setting for localhost.
When testing using a virtual machine, we need to point to the site which is running on the actual pc - not localhost, which would point to the virtual machine.
To avoid having to put individual settings in for each development machine, we have used a loop back adapter, and configured the same host name to point to the same IP address on the loop back interface.
As the loop back interface is only visible to the host pc and the individual virtual pc running on it, this can run fine despite the same IP address being used within virtual machines running on different hosts.

3/ Running a virtual machine at the same time as all our development software requires high level of resources. All our dev machines have 2GB Ram, and most of them are at least a 1.8Ghz Dual Core. 1Gb Ram is not enough - as you really need 512 dedicated to the virtual machine for it to be usable.

4/ Licensing - Every copy of windows XP you run needs its own license, therefore under normal circumstances, you'd need 2 windows licences to do this. However, MSDN licences are assigned per developer and not per installation, so if you have an MSDN subscription, you should be OK.

This approach is possibly not the easiest one, but using it we can be absolutely certain that what we are seeing is exactly what other viewers are seeing with the same browser.

Thanks Dan! Despite the cookie annoyance this was very helpful. I am counting the days (uh years) until developers won't have to support IE6.

But Dan, it's not just regular UI features that cause problems for people. I can't even use IE7 as an FTP uploading tool anymore. It's a complete disaster for me. If I could use the system the way that it was meant to be used, then I wouldn't care about some of the facial features and the UI that has been changed around. But now all I can access on FTP is my directory and I can't add anything to it. You solve that problem and maybe I'll stick with IE7. And the guys are right, the IE6 stand alone doesn't work for everyone...especially if you're running Vista--the two paired together are a monster, not that putting in IE7 makes it any less of a hassle...But how do you solve for the problems of IE7 without having to run two different versions of IE? Because the stand alone isn't working for me.

Our tech team didn?t recommend the use of IE7 at work. They found some bugs with it so we?re still stuck with IE6 and/or Firefox. I guess I need to forward your post to the tech people and see what they can say about it.