Test and debug IE6, IE7 and IE8 on one machine
I just have to quickly get this out of the way at the outset: IE sucks. Yes. All versions. It is a ghastly blight upon the internet. You listening, Bill?
But dealing with IE is part of what it is to be a designer. IE accounts for 59.02% of all traffic at ESPN.com. IE6 comes in at 16.87%. Compete.com estimates 4.5M uniques for them in March (due in large part to the Madness). You do the math. It’s a lot of eyeballs. And they all need bug fixes for hasLayout, guillotine, peekaboo, duplicate character, z-index, float, double margin and… I’m getting upset just thinking about them.
I don’t own a PC, so I run Windows with Parallels. And even then I had to run multiple VM’s so I could test my work in different versions of IE. That’s a RAM killer, and a general pain in anyone’s ass.
…which is why I use IETester with the Debug Bar. It’s not a genuine as having all the Windows OS versions, but it’s good enough to catch 99% of those maddening, vexatious IE bugs.
