Microsoft has offered up something to all of us looking for an easy way to develop sites in both IE 6 and IE 7 from the same machine. From their blog:

Microsoft has recently made Virtual PC 2004 a free download; we’ve taken advantage of that by releasing a VPC virtual machine image containing a pre-activated Windows XP SP2, IE6 and the IE7 Readiness Toolkit to help facilitate your testing and development.

IEBlog : IE6 and IE7 Running on a Single Machine

What also looks promising is their mention of "we’re also investigating creating other VPC images, for example IE5, IE5.5, IE6 and IE6 SP1, as well as versions of IE on different language operating systems." This is a great way to test the extreme backwards compatibility that you often need to take into account when developing for large corporate bases, or smaller businesses, who, as audiences, may very well be locked into a certain browser – no matter how outdated – for business IT reasons. MS may very well let us test that old version of IE5.5 that only the very few still use (and, by the way, people ARE still using it, as a look at my employer’s logs show me).

This certainly beats my current cross-browser-version development platform: using Remote Desktop to connect to a second box on my desk running IE7 (and FF 2.0).

technorati tags:ie6, ie7, cross browser, web development

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 2nd, 2006 at 1:44 pm and is filed under browser bugs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.