Okay so testing in Internet Explorer has always been testing (sorry about that – but it has!). IE 7 has shown a marked improvement in consistency but there are a large number of people still using IE 6, in fact a huge 28.9% of people which is unbelievable. Yet what is more unbelievable is that the figure is higher than the 24.9% of people using IE7. This figure is going up though and you can keep an eye on it here: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
So, it looks like we?re stuck with IE 6 for a while longer, and therefore testing on it is still necessary no matter how much you hate it (http://toastytech.com/evil/index.html). Testing on multiple browsers has always been a pain as you cannot run multiple versions of IE on a single operating system. Previous solutions to this problem have included:
- Get another computer.
- Install a virtual machine.
- Drop support for IE6.
- Hack IE7 to work standalone.
- Use online services http://browsershots.org/
But now there is another option that has just emerged from those guys over at DebugBar called IETester http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage . IETester is a free web browser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 1, IE7, IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP all at once. They are calling it Alpha software, which would suggests there will be other versions coming out.
For the time being, I would still give your site a thorough going over in native copies of IE before making it live.
