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Microsoft allowing IE6 & 7 on same machine (sort of)

Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 11:38 am
by Luke
Microsoft is releasing VPC for free to allow for IE6 and IE7 on the same machine for developers to test with. I grabbed a quote from the blog post about it. Check it out...
IEBlog wrote:Microsoft has recently made Virtual PC 2004 a free download; we’ve taken advantage of that by releasing a VPC virtual machine image containing a pre-activated Windows XP SP2, IE6 and the IE7 Readiness Toolkit to help facilitate your testing and development.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/1 ... chine.aspx

Mods, I apologize if this is copyrighted content or anything like that (the quote). If so, please feel free to remove it.

Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 3:26 pm
by nickvd
Meh... I refuse to run an operating system within an operating system for the sole purpose of testing in ie6... they should release a standalone version that will allow me to run them both at the same time.. People outside of MSFT have been able to do it, I highly doubt that they will be un-able, just un-willing...

Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 3:29 pm
by RobertGonzalez
Since full-blown IE7 adoption is still a bit of a ways off I am still developing for IE6. When I start hearing things about "IE7 keeps breaking my page" I will upgrade at that time. :twisted:

Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 5:16 pm
by nickvd
Everah wrote:Since full-blown IE7 adoption is still a bit of a ways off I am still developing for IE6. When I start hearing things about "IE7 keeps breaking my page" I will upgrade at that time. :twisted:
We've been working almost non-stop at fixing ie7 issues on past client sites... (most of it was caused before i started working here though ;))

Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 5:18 pm
by RobertGonzalez
For some reason that just makes me like MS a little less.

Posted: Sat Dec 02, 2006 4:45 pm
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
Isn't there already standalone versions of IE all the way back to v4? Albeit, not MS sourced and created from some creative DLL and Registry research ;). No need in those cases for a VPC and a complex setup.

http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/32bit (see standalone dir)

Posted: Tue Dec 05, 2006 2:54 am
by matthijs
The standalones from Evolt (which Maugrim linked) work fine. Last week I installed http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE. One package with ie3 - ie6. Works fine as well.

There's always some debate as to what the best test-solution is. In theory, the best would be to have multiple OS-installs, in virtual pc's or physical pc's. However, I find it a bit too much to have a couple of pc's running just for testing one or two browsers.

And even though I can install parrallels on my mac and run XP next to OS X I don't feel like doing that (just feels ... wrong :) ). So until now I manage perfect with the standalones on an older pc.

Posted: Tue Dec 05, 2006 4:15 am
by m3mn0n
Everah wrote:Since full-blown IE7 adoption is still a bit of a ways off I am still developing for IE6. When I start hearing things about "IE7 keeps breaking my page" I will upgrade at that time. :twisted:
Call me a freak but lately I've been pushing to develop my sites for & test heavily in: Firefox, IE 6, IE 7, Opera *and* Safari.

Mainly because I've had users of all of those clients personally come to me and whine about certain details that annoy the hell out of them.

It sometime feels like the QA testing equivalent of nails on a chalkboard and it makes me want to go back in time and scream at every guy who decided it was cool to do their own thing with their own browser.

I can't wait until a time when browsers parse nearly identically and the only difference really would be the UI and extra features. But the core set of features/abilities should damn well be the same (*cough* web standards! *cough*) and look the same in every browser (acid2, anyone?). *sigh*

Posted: Tue Dec 05, 2006 1:50 pm
by nickvd
It sometime feels like the QA testing equivalent of nails on a chalkboard and it makes me want to go back in time and scream at every guy who decided it was cool to do their own thing with their own browser.
You have no idea how many times i've wanted to learn the art of thermo-nuclear weapons creation... Ever since IE7 came out, we've been struggling to fix all the "problems" caused by ie7 on sites we/i've made prior to learning about ie7 (conditional comments reading IF IE)...

I've now taken to using lots of cc's to ensure proper functioning...

Code: Select all

<!--[if lt IE 7]> target ie 6 and below
      <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/ie6sucks.css" type="text/css" />
   <![endif]-->
   <!--[if gt IE 7]> target the newest POS...
      <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/ie7WasSupposedToBeGood.css" type="text/css" />
   <![endif]-->
   <!--[if IE]> target them all :( :( :(
      <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/iesucksthebigone.css" type="text/css" />
   <![endif]-->
I of course dont use those filenames in production sites (not anymore at least ;))

Posted: Tue Dec 05, 2006 2:03 pm
by matthijs
nickvd, what kind of problems have you encountered the most?
(maybe an idea for a seperate thread in client side)
I just started testing with ie7 and haven't found any problems so far, apart from a few pixels of difference in layout here and there. (but I'm sure I'll encounter them at some point)

Posted: Tue Dec 05, 2006 2:46 pm
by nickvd
Most of it is pixel issues like you mentioned nothing too major, however on a few sites, the recently fixed behaviour file problem (server sends wrong mimetype, ie7 ignores the file) caused their dropdown menus to fail. One other site (which used some old javascript dropdown animation script) failed to display any menu items what-so-ever... The standard clear-fix doesn't work anymore on ie7 without a minor change to the rules (adding zoom:1; will trigger hasLayout in IE7).

As i go, i'll try to keep a log of the problems we're encountering...

Most of the problems are not overly major, and they're (usually) quick to fix, but when you have hundreds of clients with different tech on each site, half designed by my boss (who STILL loves font tags and uses tables to right align), half designed by me (love css, hate fonts/tables) it gets REALLY annoying, REALLY quickly.

Ever since ie7 was announced, and I learned about CC's, I've been using them quite extensively, so I doubt we'll have many problems in the future.

/me crosses his fingers...

Posted: Tue Dec 05, 2006 2:51 pm
by matthijs
Ok, thanx for the reply. Indeed I can imagine how annoying that can be. As with many IE bugs they can show up quite randomly (so you miss them with a quick check). Like disappearing or moving content due to hovering over a link elsewhere on the same page ... :)