Testing Your Website On All Versions of IE

Why?

This is an extremely important factor for any website layout. Your website needs to work on as many browsers as possible and needs to look good on as many browsers as possible. Disappointing a specific browser population is not something you want to do especially if you’re looking to appeal to the masses or profit from ad revenue. Believe it or not, people don’t enjoy spending time (or clicking ads) on websites with broken layouts. That being said, it is in your absolute best interest to accommodate as many users as you can for your own sake.

How Big is Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer, by itself, accounts for 78.67% of the total browser market share in May 2007. This means if you test on any browser, this is THE browser you should concentrate on testing on.

This can end up being quite difficult if you’re on a Mac. The latest version of Internet Explorer supported on the Macintosh is 5.2. This is not sufficient for testing because according to a graph on Browser Market Share in May 2007, Internet Explorer 5.0 - <5.5 accounts for 0.28% of the market. You need a resource able to run Internet Explorer 6 and 7 (IE6 & IE7). Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) has 46.76% of the browser market share, and Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), 31.26%.

Testing Websites in Internet Explorer on your Mac

If you’re on a Macintosh you have two options:

• You need a Windows Emulator and a copy of Windows XP.
• You need to be able to dual-boot into Windows XP and a copy of Windows XP.

A third option, is installing Linux, but this is a little more unlikely, but I’ll talk about it further in the article.

The reason we need Windows XP is because you need a strategy for testing on Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) which accounts for 31.26% of the market share. To install Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), you need to have Service Pack 2 (SP2) installed. In turn, to install Service Pack 2 (SP2), you need a valid version of Windows XP.

Please note that you may be able to get around having a valid version of Windows XP by downloading Google’s optimized version of Internet Explorer 7.

Now that we have Windows XP up and running, onto the next section.

Testing Websites in Internet Explorer in Windows

Once you’re up and running in Windows XP, you can download a nifty program called MultipleIEs which, obviously, allows to install multiple versions of Internet Explorer. The reason we needed Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) capability was because it is not supported on the current version of MultipleIEs.

MultipleIEs lets you install stand-alone versions of the major versions of Internet Explorer:

• Internet Explorer 3.0 (IE3)
• Internet Explorer 4.01 (IE4)
• Internet Explorer 5.01 (IE5)
• Internet Explorer 5.5 (IE55)
• Internet Explorer 6.0 (IE6)

This is by far the easiest way to install multiple versions of Internet Explorer on your computer to test your browsers in.

Testing Websites in Internet Explorer in Linux

Linux is an operating system, I won’t go into details about it, this blog isn’t the place, but if you’re interested on learning more and downloading a copy, Ubuntu is a really great Linux-based operating system.

There exists an alternative to MultipleIEs for Linux, it’s called IEs4Linux. IEs4Linux allows these major versions of Internet Explorer:

• Internet Explorer 5.0 (IE5)
• Internet Explorer 5.5 (IE55)
• Internet Explorer 6.0 (IE6)

Now that we have IE6 covered, here’s a great post that talks about getting Internet Explorer 7 running on Linux.

Hope that helps.

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