Is there something better than IE Tester?

[louie540]

It's hard for me to try and check how my websites look in older versions of Internet Explorer when the program I'm using keeps crashing. Is there any program that tests a website in IE that works right?

Thanks.

[Immerse]

I haven't found one yet, but what you could do is to to download the Virtual PC images from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en....aspx?id=11575

[louie540]

The list looks overwhelming, but I'll go ahead and consider it. Thanks.

[Force Flow]

A little more of an explaination of virtual PC images and IETester: http://adamthetech.com/2012/02/micro...achine-images/

IETester is very handy, but it has its share of quirks and problems. The only sure way to test something is to be as close as possible to the native environment (which virtual machines do quite well).

[TomH]

Another alternative that I've been looking into recently is crossbrowsertesting.com, which lets you use a variety of virtual machines across different platforms. Does anyone have any experience with this?

[louie540]

Ok thanks guys

[Force Flow]

Another alternative that I've been looking into recently is crossbrowsertesting.com, which lets you use a variety of virtual machines across different platforms. Does anyone have any experience with this?

Most of those types of services are not free (including that one).

browsershots.org is one of the few free ones I'm aware of, but it doesn't always work properly, and you're limited to just individual screenshots.

[ULTiMATE]

At my current workplace we have a machine set up with VirtualBox, where we have installed XP and different versions of IE and Firefox ourselves. The Virtual PC installs are typically fine, but they can be a bit slow if you're regularly switching between IE6/7/8 on separate VM's.

[samanime]

Adobe Browser Labs works quite well. I think it's free if you have something else (or completely free, not sure, it was kind of in flux last time I looked at it).

Personally I go the exact route as ULTiMATE, various VirtualBox machines with different versions of IE and Firefox on each.

If you keep the RAM pretty low and have a machine with high RAM, you can have multiples all running at the same time (I have 8 GB in my work machine, so running 3 1GB RAM VMs is pretty easy).