I just want to second this recommendation. It's a very thorough collection, quite stable, and helpfully has IE Developer Toolbar preinstalled on IE5 and up.
I'm not getting any web seed activity. I'm guessing it might be due to the seeds linking to /spoon/ie6.exe/ etc, with the last slash included, which doesn't go anywhere if you visit it with a browser. Know of a way to edit the file?
Yeah, I don't think uTorrent created the urls properly. TPB reports "temporarily disabled" for editing the torrent though :/ I'll bump my seeding cap up a bit to help.
This is really one of the only solutions for testing against the various IE images. The IE team tries to have people use their VPC images (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=...), but they expire every 6 months (and twice I've had to remind the team that they haven't updated the images post-expiration).
Expression Web SuperPreview is really cool, until you try to interact with your page/site in any way. It can't even handle clicking on a link, let alone submits/POSTs.
I do IE6 testing in a Win2K VM, which has the advantage of being rather light on memory.
But I find MS's apparent determination to make webdevs' lives as difficult as possible extremely frustrating. The time-limited VMs that used to work on Fusion weren't perfect, but they showed good faith, and the Spoon solution was really nice.
What possible loss do they think follows from this exploitation of their IP??
This is great. I copied these .exe files out of my temp internet files a couple of years ago and have been using them ever since. Far more practical, and portable, than using VMs.
I've got them in my Dropbox so I can even run a bit of cross-browser testing when I'm coding on someone else's PC.
The benefit to the VPC images is that they can be converted to something VirtualBox understands, and used under OSX and Linux, as well. Still a PITA to have to do that every 6 months, though.
Four months now, and Microsoft recently made changes to the activation code such that if it can detect you're not running in VirtualPC (on Windows, natch), then it disables itself. I've tried multiple avenues of converting the latest timebomb (came out a couple of weeks ago) to both VirtualBox and VMware and have been completely unsuccessful.
The only time I've ever tried to convert one of the VPC images, the guest OS decided that my hardware had changed too much and demanded that I reactivate it. Unfortunately, activation isn't available for these images, and the image became unusable. What's your trick?
I've found that signing up for a Microsoft tech net subscription is a decent way to get access to various os/browsers without having to deal with any timed expirations. You can download any of the currently supported Microsoft OSs and setup a bunch of virtual Machines. Plus, office and other application software is available as well.
I'm certainly not thrilled with this setup as I wish Microsoft could just allow different IE versions to be installed side by side. But the subscription cost is $200 in the US, so basically if you were planning to by a license to any piece of Microsoft software you might as well get this instead.
Wine is not a reliable platform for testing browser compatibility. Even when I have gotten IE working with ies4linux or a similar thing, Wine's IE still misrenders portions of the page occasionally (of course, depending on what version of Wine you're running -- I haven't tested IE in Wine for a long time). You need to use IE on a real Windows installation to verify it will work correctly for your users, Wine is just too much of a moving target.
I've been seeing recommendations to run them under compatibility mode if problems crop up; try that, and if it doesn't work I can boot 7 and give a couple things a try myself.
same problem here, compatibility mode and disabling desktop composition does nothing. IE7 just pops and closes. IE6 and IE8 run fine. Win7 64 bit here.
Ah, I've never heard of those before. Are these commonly used by webdevs? bbatsell said they now only work on Windows, and considering that a lot of (most?) webdevs use Macs, they're probably not too useful.
I've never heard of it, or seen it referenced on any design blog, or seen any marketing of it whatsoever. I'm not necessarily claiming that I'm an accurate sample of the web development/design community, but it certainly seems to be pretty under represented.
From what I can tell from it's product page, it seems to have a very gimmicky marketing-speak write up (count the number of times the product is named!). It also doesn't let you run IE7 and IE8 at the same time.
I think it's an example of a good intention on Microsoft's part that hasn't been executed or marketed incredibly well.
Any web developer worth salt has to preview their work on IE6-IE9. And everyone has to jump through hoops to make this work (And no, VMs are not an acceptable solution. Why should I bog down my machine with a VM when I just need an extra freaking browser?)
So there comes Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview. How did they even come up with such a name? What it does is it allows you to open several frames side-by-side, each with a version of IE. It's a great idea, it's JUST what I needed. But what it doesn't let you do is actually interact with the pages. You can only see, not click. Want to test a JavaScript behavior? Sorry.
The gimmicky name and the lack of marketing evidently obscure it further. No surprise you've never heard of it. I completely accidentally stumbled across it last year.
This package largely automates the process of downloading and installing IE5, IE5.5, and IE6, with beta support for IE7, IE8, and IE9, and support for IE1, IE1.5, and IE2 almost as a joke.
Ie9 allows you to switch the display mode between IE7, IE8, IE9. However, it does not allow IE6.
Also, I'm not yet certain how accurate the older modes are. I did write some code with a known IE7 bug that worked fine in 8 & 9... and which I switched IE9 to IE7 mode the bug occurred as I had expected it to. (Press F12 in IE9 to see the option to select display mode). Apologies if this sounds kind of rambly, as I just woke up...
Downloading these either way so that I can do some additional testing.
For the most part the compatibility modes work, but there are inconsistencies - such as bugs that appear in IE7, but not in IE8 in compatibility mode. Its a headache, and one that's somewhat remedied by just using the actual browsers.
Does Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview (Microsoft's official tool for this purpose, which comes with the various rendering engines plugged into a meta-browser) have these same deficiencies?
