Also, this is JUST snapshots! (DOM and image) They stop running Javascript after the onLoad, and then stop. Thus, you can't examine any sort of interactive element. I want my upvote back...
This is junk and has been uninstalled. Page loads are absurdly slow. The fact that you can't interact with the page renders it almost pointless. I can't believe its this difficult for M$ to make a worthwhile multi browser testing tool. I will stick with testing on multiple computers / standalone versions for now.
Hands down the best solution is to load up a single Windows VM and install a bunch of these standalone, sandboxed browsers from Xenocode: http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/
You can test across IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari versions.
Worth noting - There's a related service at http://browsershots.org/ where you can see how a webpage renders in a number of different OS & browser configurations. It's been very handy for me to make sure my designed-in-linux pages still looked decent to Mac/Windows users.
this is not really the same thing, but it can help:
"Install multiple versions of IE on your PC"
http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE
It hasn't been updated in a while, I really only use it to be able to run IE6 alongside IE7 (which i have installed in the normal way) for testing purposes.
Unfortunately, installing both IE6 and IE7 on the same machine causes IE6 to mishandle cookies, among other problems. You won't be able to log into many sites (Drupal sites, for example) when using this method.
I'm very disappointed to see that this is just snapshots and only runs in Windows. I would probably pay $10 / mo. for a Mac OS X suite that ran ie6, ie7, and ie8 without requiring me to use VM Ware or Parallels. The best solution I've found so far is crossbrowsertesting.com, but it's a little slow and tedious.
I downloaded it and tried it out and it was way too slow. For a simple, local, static web page, it took more than 3 seconds to see the results. It is much faster to run IE 6 in the VirtualPC image Microsoft provides.
Is this using some kind of online, BrowserShots-like service? I was expecting that it would have some specially-packaged internal version of IE6 inside of it, so that you would be using two local browsers that download the content through some kind of tee-like HTTP proxy (that is, everything downloaded once, and then sent to both browsers).
I think if Microsoft want me to test websites on their browsers, they should release a free or minimal cost developer's pack containing several actual versions of Windows and IE versions that I can run in Virtual Machines.
Seems like we still don't get to see ie7 and ie8 together, which makes this far from perfect. I'll stick with IETester for now and keep hoping that we can all drop support for IE6 soon.
