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Like everyone else, I need to test my code on Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7. Now Internet Explorer 8 has some great tools for developer, which I'd like to use. I'd also like to start testing my code with Internet Explorer 8, as it will soon be released.

The question is: how to run Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 8 on the same machine. So far with Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 I've been using Multiple IE. But people have reported (see comments on the page linked in the previous sentence) issue with Internet Explorer 6 after installing Internet Explorer 8. Those errors are related to focus in form fields. Running Internet Explorer 7 wouldn't matter so much as Internet Explorer 8 can use the Internet Explorer 7 rendering engine, but we still need Internet Explorer 6.

How to run Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 8 on the same machine?

ЯegDwight
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avernet
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  • IE8 Compatibility does not do the same as IE7. I Have run into many cases where they were different. – corymathews Sep 14 '09 at 15:43
  • @corymatthews, that's true, but the standalones ARE the real thing and can be installed side-by-side. IE8 normal, IE7 standalone and IE6 standalone. – Dan Rosenstark May 18 '10 at 17:55
  • See http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9686/what-is-the-most-rampant-duplicate-on-stack-exchange-sites/73989#73989 for a "small" list of duplicates. – Rob W Jan 28 '12 at 10:43
  • I think simply changing the rendering engine in IE 8 to earlier versions will be sufficient for testing. – Lucas Sep 22 '12 at 23:09
  • see ["IECollection"](http://utilu.com/IECollection/): Runs under many versions of Windows OS. But "best under 32-bit version of Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 (whether or not in a virtual machine)". Hence best to install a MS Windows XP SP3 Virtual Machine & run IECollection inside it. see http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/09/02/reliable-cross-browser-testing-part-1-internet-explorer/ – Adriano Feb 07 '14 at 19:15
  • see the modern.IE (MS project) updated answer (2013) http://stackoverflow.com/a/14722473/759452 – Adriano Feb 07 '14 at 19:26
  • .. and also you can use [BrowseEmAll](http://www.browseemall.com/) . – masoud Aug 31 '14 at 07:39
  • I didn't want to make it an answer so I am going to comment. There is a website that is completely free to use that will take screenshots of what it looks like in ANY browser new or old and on different OSes. Try using something like that. http://browsershots.org/ – ZaxLofful Aug 28 '15 at 22:46

38 Answers38

221

I wouldn't do it. Use virtual PCs instead. It might take a little setup, but you'll thank yourself in the long run. In my experience, you can't really get them cleanly installed side by side and unless they are standalone installs you can't really verify that it is 100% true-to-browser rendering.

Update: Looks like one of the better ways to accomplish this (if running Windows 7) is using Windows XP mode to set up multiple virtual machines: Testing Multiple Versions of IE on one PC at the IEBlog.

Update 2: (11/2014) There are new solutions since this was last updated. Microsoft now provides VMs for any environment to test multiple versions of IE: Modern.IE

Glorfindel
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Ian Robinson
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    tangent: http://www.virtualbox.org/ looks cool. I haven't tried it myself - this may be a good opportunity to try it though? – Ian Robinson Feb 22 '09 at 06:36
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    It sucks that this is the correct answer. Microsoft should make this work. Unless your machine is an expensive behemoth on steroids, you can't run multiple virtual machines at the same time, which means you have to test and fix for each browser at separate times. – Bjorn Feb 22 '09 at 06:48
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    @irobinson Yes, would be a good opportunity to try VirtualBox :). But are there Windows images with IE8 freely available for VirtualBox? – avernet Feb 22 '09 at 06:56
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    @apphacker Indeed! Answers don't reflect the world as it should be, but as it is ;). – avernet Feb 22 '09 at 06:57
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    @apphacker: How many people in this world actually *need* three different browser versions running side by side? You can't blame Microsoft or any other software company for not writing their software to the .000001% that need such a thing. – Dave Swersky Mar 20 '09 at 00:53
  • As other mention, is really a PITA to have 2 virtual machines running at the same time, and you forget to mention that you have to publish to some intermediate server if you developing with VS2008 using Casini web server. Not a good solution for me. – Eduardo Molteni Apr 22 '09 at 13:40
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    @Dave...I'd wager that a large percentage of people that develop large scale web apps need this. We're really not talking about that small a percentage here. Besides, plenty of other people would like this too...I'd like to be able to upgrade my software without having it blow away my old copy, so I could just go back to my old version easily, if I decide to. – Beska May 19 '09 at 19:32
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    This question links to a Microsoft support page where you can download VMs containing IE 6, IE 7 and IE 8: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/135057/internet-explorer-8-and-ie-6-side-by-side – Paul D. Waite Jun 05 '09 at 14:34
  • @Dave It's not writing software for the most common users. It's writing software which will help generate Microsoft the most amount of profit / market share – jklp Jul 28 '09 at 23:16
  • Windows 7 provides another option w/ XP Mode: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx With the caveat that your processor needs to have special virtualization capabilities (which mine doesn't). – Ian Robinson Aug 19 '09 at 20:23
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    Here you can download the VirtualPC Windows images http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en – Esteban Küber Aug 19 '09 at 20:57
  • So the standalone installs are flawed? How? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2859010/ie6-and-ie7-standalone-what-do-they-render-differently – Dan Rosenstark May 18 '10 at 17:48
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    I Absolutely recommend to use Virtual PC 6.1 and Auto-Publish feature, which you can run xp applications in windows 7, like they are running in windows xp, don't forget to copy IEs shortcut to the 'All User > Programs' after enabling Auto-Publish feature. – Beygi Jul 06 '11 at 13:52
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    What's even better than setting up virtual instances is having someone else do it: http://crossbrowsertesting.com – mfollett Aug 13 '12 at 22:33
  • VM works great for layout testing, not good of JavaScript speed optimization testing. There, only dual-booting will do IMHO. – tomByrer Dec 26 '13 at 01:36
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    Hi Microsoft has updated this post and now they offer virtual machines for many virtualization products such as Virtual PC, Virtual Box, VmWare etc. Please find the options and the virtual machines here http://loc.modern.ie/es/virtualization-tools#downloads – Juan Feb 17 '14 at 18:55
156

Nobody mentioned this, but IETester is a great tool. It supports Internet Explorer 5.5, 6, 7 and 8RC1. The rendering matches the corresponding browsers. At least I haven't found any discrepancies yet.

I normally use it to do a basic check of the layout. I still need VMs to debug JavaScript or to use the Developer Toolbar with a specific Internet Explorer version.

IETester 0.3

Ilmari Karonen
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Tsvetomir Tsonev
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    @Tsvetomir Tsonev, thank you for the link. In this case I'll need to debug JS code, so I guess I won't escape installing a VM, but for layout issues IETester is a good pick. – avernet Feb 22 '09 at 21:05
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    This is a nice idea, but actually not licensed. Microsoft's IE licenses expressly forbid redistribution, and while they are unlikely to come down on this sort of application if your organisation is audited it technically counts as pirated. – Keith Apr 22 '09 at 12:40
  • While this is technically true, I'm sure Microsoft won't mind as this tool helps developers write software for their own browsers. I can only dream of the day when Microsoft will sue anyone for distributing IE6 :) Besides it doesn't disclose anything that is (or was) not already available with Windows. I wouldn't lose my sleep over some canned EULAs, but if in doubt just use VMs, as they're the more reliable and accurate option anyway. – Tsvetomir Tsonev Apr 22 '09 at 19:40
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    IETester has occasional bugs which is pretty nasty when you don't expectit. For example with cookies set from javacript. – Sergey May 19 '09 at 20:27
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    The site I'm working with has popups and this seems to break this tool. Didn't work for me. – jcollum Aug 12 '09 at 15:52
  • Although this tool is nice, it has some limitations. I had issues with Uploadify not working in IE6/IE7 with IETester, but Uploadify worked just fine in Virtual/Real machines. – Bryan Denny Aug 19 '09 at 19:14
  • Works awesomely except for popup window interaction. If I could vote for only 1 bug in IETester to be fixed, it would be popups. – scunliffe Sep 29 '09 at 18:10
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    Unfortunately IETester is quite buggy - quite often behaviour for native installation of, say, IE6 differ from IETester – Art May 13 '10 at 22:52
  • This failed for me. Be aware that some IE8 er in reality IE7. – Babak Bandpay Feb 14 '11 at 10:35
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    ***SUPER BUGGY***. Crashes continually. No good. Use Modern.IE instead. – iconoclast Sep 05 '13 at 15:05
  • IETester is not a great tool, you need to be running native browsers for real testing – James Brandon Dec 29 '13 at 10:44
55

You can use the new MS Expression Web SuperPreview

alt text
(source: istartedsomething.com)

If you do not want to spend money on MS Expression Web, you can download Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview for Windows Internet Explorer completely free. The only restriction is that after the trial expires you can't compare to non IE browsers.

Glorfindel
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Eduardo Molteni
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  • How does this work with IE8? I don't it on my computer now, so if I download it, will it show me 6, 7, and 8? – Martin Sep 16 '09 at 18:07
  • I'm using it as part of MS Expression (not the IE attached version) and works very well. A bit slow in my case, but I do not have a super-machine – Eduardo Molteni Sep 16 '09 at 19:05
  • @Martin: Yes, if you have IE8, you can view IE7 via compatibility view, IE6 and IE8 of course. – Eduardo Molteni Sep 16 '09 at 19:08
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    Am I right in saying that it just renders the page, but you can't actually interact with it (as in press buttons, enter text, etc.)? That makes it less useful as I thought, because you can't actually browse the site as a user would do. – Tom van Enckevort Oct 09 '09 at 12:01
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    Its not really that super a product to be honest, slow (very very very very slow) and also no interaction. – JL. Nov 25 '09 at 21:00
  • I am using it but results vary sometimes. I always check my website using the IE "netrenderer". it requires microsoft .net framework 4 and the preview that it generates are rendered from IE8's capability of rendering IE7 based websites (you can do that using the web developer tools addons for IE too) which is not 100% correct. It is also very very very very slow when opening websites from remote server. – Gaurav Sharma Aug 29 '11 at 11:04
  • @shareef "Expression Web SuperPreview is a standalone, free application. It provides the same functionality as the version of SuperPreview included in Expression Web for a trial period of 60 days. After the trial period, SuperPreview continues to render your pages in all versions of Internet Explorer" – Eduardo Molteni Jul 11 '12 at 13:49
50

I would also suggest running a few virtual machines rather than running multiple versions of Internet Explorer on the same instance of Windows.

Microsoft provides Virtual PC disk images with Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 at the Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image download page.

The current list of virtual disk images available from the above link are:

  • Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP SP3
  • Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP SP3
  • Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP SP3
  • Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista
  • Internet Explorer 8 on Windows Vista

(List is current as of October 11, 2009. All versions have expiration dates.)

coobird
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  • Is there a way to make this images working in VirtualBox?It's no problem to create a VM with the image and start it, but it crashes during boot. I gues this is due to different VM hardware of VirtualPC and VirtualBox. – BetaRide May 11 '11 at 06:41
  • Recently (10/2011) I went looking for these, and discovered that MS has removed the Windows XP images with IE7 and IE8. Ditto for IE8 on Vista. IE7 is now Vista only (4179MB vs. 366MB) and IE8 is Windows 7 only (2633MB vs. 366MB) – David M. Miller Nov 01 '11 at 16:59
  • @coobird: I went looking for these recently (10/2011), and discovered that MS no longer has Win XP SP3 images with IE7 or IE8 (or, for what it's worth, Vista with IE8). The only IE7 image they have available now is Vista only (4179MB vs. 366MB); the IE8 image is Windows 7 only (2633MB vs. 366MB). Better off installing Windows XP Mode on Win7 Pro and making copies for IE7 and IE 8, as suggested by Ian Robinson in the first post: [Testing Multiple Versions of IE on One PC - IEBlogs](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/02/04/testing-multiple-versions-of-ie-on-one-pc.aspx) – David M. Miller Nov 01 '11 at 17:08
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    You can download the Windows XP image with IE6 and upgrade IE to 7 or 8 from there. See this screenshot of a fresh image: http://i.imgur.com/z1udL.jpg – Paul Lammertsma Apr 21 '12 at 13:49
40

modern.IE is an undertaking by Microsoft to make cross-browser testing for the Internet Explorer browsers easier. Microsoft has created modern.IE to provide developers and designers with a suite of tools to facilitate IE browser testing.

With modern.IE you have two methods of testing your website in IE. First, modern.IE offers you three months free usage of the web-based browser testing service BrowserStack. You just need a Facebook account to login and start testing.

The second method modern.IE offers is a virtualization image of each browser from IE 6 to IE 10, which can be run on virtualization software like VirtualBox, Virtual PC, Hyper-V or VMWare Player on WIndows, Mac or Linux.

Additionally, modern.IE also provides a tool which scans your web page for common coding problems and lists them out for you to correct so that they display correctly in all IE versions.

Source: modern.IE - Cross-Browser IE Testing Tools Suite

Denilson Sá Maia
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Hirvesh
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18

Try http://finalbuilds.edskes.net/iecollection.htm.

Utilu IE Collection contains multiple IE versions, which are standalone so they can be used at the same time.

Conditional Comments work exactly the same as in the native versions. The original version number is shown correctly in the User Agent string. The version number can be found in the window title too.

Utilu IE Collection also includes the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar 1.00.2189.0. This Explorer Bar provides a variety of tools which make troubleshooting websites easier. The Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar is compatible with Internet Explorer 5.0 and higher when using Windows 2000 or higher.

Utilu IE Collection has the option to install the Firebug Web Development Extension for Internet Explorer. Firebug provides a lot of useful tools which make web development easier...

gnat
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Fabien Ménager
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  • I use this with a Win XP VirtualBox instance. I've only noticed one thing not consistent with a standalone IE6 experience: occasionally it will not let me enter focus on form fields and when I try it on a real machine running only IE6 there is no problem. – Ty W Feb 11 '10 at 16:10
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    That looks really good. Does anyone have any feedback on it ? – Clement Herreman Mar 03 '10 at 14:43
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    I use it when I have to test old IEs (IE6+) in "native" mode, not the IE8 compatibility mode, but it is buggy under Seven. When I work on a Win7 computer, I use a VirtualBox virtual machine with a Windows XP on it with IE collection. – Fabien Ménager Mar 03 '10 at 16:00
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    For windows Xp, this is the best answer! Been using it for a long time already and it is very nice. – Michael Koper Oct 21 '11 at 09:54
  • Windows 7x64 not installing v7, v8, and 5,5.5,6,6sp2 not working at all. (Writes IE 4.0, Version: 9.0 in every version) – deejayy Nov 09 '11 at 09:24
  • I can at least launch "real" IE7 (WinXP) while having IE8. However, I can only render pages. Can't open dev tools for instance... (throws errors) – jakub.g May 15 '12 at 11:07
  • Yes, buggy under Windows 7. Best to run it in a Windows XP SP3 virtual machine. – Adriano Feb 07 '14 at 19:24
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You can't use IE8 to replace IE7. The JavaScript engine in IE8 is never the same as in IE7. Try leaving trailing commas in array or object literals in both IE7 and IE8 - you'll get an error in the former, but not the latter even in compatibility mode. If you want your site to work in IE7, you need to test in IE7.

Bjorn
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  • Thankfully, IE9 is actually pretty good at reproducing the bugs of IE7 and 8 when you use the developer tools to change modes. I'm pretty sure I've found trailing commas and such using IE9 in this way. – Simon East Oct 12 '11 at 01:41
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I use http://www.spoon.net/browsers (Windows-only).

You can run IE8, IE7, IE6, Firefox 3.5, Firefox 3, Firefox 2, Safari 4, Safari 3, Opera 10, Opera 9, Chrome.

You just need to install a plugin, and then click on the corresponding icon. It will download and run the files needed to run each of the above mentioned browsers.

Denilson Sá Maia
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Alex Bagnolini
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    *"Microsoft has asked us to remove Internet Explorer from this service."* – Denilson Sá Maia Dec 04 '10 at 15:15
  • As of 2011-01-24, there is no IE support: "Come back soon for more information on how to use Internet Explorer on Spoon.net!" – Christopher Jan 24 '11 at 21:34
  • The stand-alone files are still available, see [Quick browser testing: Internet explorer (version 6, 7 and 8)](http://stackoverflow.com/q/4227959/938089?quick-browser-testing-internet-explorer-version-6-7-and-8). This does not work for Windows 7 though. – Rob W Jan 28 '12 at 09:55
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    @DenilsonSá: The Service is back ;) – Adriano Feb 07 '14 at 19:27
  • There is a similar service that does not require plugins and should work on Mac/Linux/Windows: http://crossbrowsertesting.com/ – Denilson Sá Maia Feb 10 '14 at 14:17
9

If you have IE8 installed in your machine, you can test how your site works in IE7 too. When you are in the page you need to test in IE7 browser, Open "Tools"->"developer tools". And then in the menu of that "Developer tools" dialog box, Click on "Browser Mode:[CURRENT MODE]" and there you can select 3 options. that is,

  1. IE7
  2. IE8
  3. IE8 Compatibility Mode
Manjula
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8

Backing up the other users, you will need to run Virtual PC instances on your Windows box. If you try to do a multi install of Internet Explorer, you will break conditional comments on pages, which will make testing difficult anyway (For example, With Internet Explorer 5, 6 and 7. On a Windows box, the IF Internet Explorer statements will resolve to Internet Explorer 7 even in Internet Explorer 5, which means even more weird bugs.

More information and a link to download and run a Internet Explorer 6 Virtual Image: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/04/17/ie7-virtual-pc-image-and-ie6-virtual-pc-image-refresh.aspx

If you have Virtual PC already, here is the image: http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21eabb90-958f-4b64-b5f1-73d0a413c8ef&displaylang=en

Peter Mortensen
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SuperRoach
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  • @superroach Interesting, conditional comments being broken makes it one more reason to use virtual machines. – avernet Feb 22 '09 at 06:59
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I did this on my Windows 7 computer today:

  1. Installed Windows Virtual PC, and ran XP Mode
  2. Created two Windows XP images. One with Internet Explorer 6 and one with Internet Explorer 7.
  3. Now I can run these to browsers from my Windows 7 desktop! Just like any other application. No need to open Virtual PC.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/

Peter Mortensen
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Tommy
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5

There is one elegant way to run IE6, IE7 and IE8 on the same machine, called virtual PC.

First download virtual PC from Microsoft website here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloadS/details.aspx?FamilyID=04d26402-3199-48a3-afa2-2dc0b40a73b6&displaylang=en

Then download 3 EXE files with IE6, IE7 and IE8 here:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en

Install them on your PC and test your web applications. Saved me days of looking for similar solutions.

Toronto Website Designers
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Very good option is update to Internet Explorer 10. You will find very useful developers tools including compatibility with from IE5 to IE 10 including quirks mode. If switch the IE version i menu, the page rendering of the page is changing immediately.

Very good feature of this mode is javascript and HTML (firebug like) debugger, which works in compatibility mode. It means, you can debug javascript in very old IE with the newest debugger, which is very cool feature. You cannot do that with virtual machine. Yes, you can have virtual machine for checking the final result. enter image description here

Tomas Kubes
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    Unfortunately I've found many things that work in a newer browser in an older browser mode, but which don't actually work in the older browser. There is no substitute for testing on the real browser. – Paul Tomblin Feb 17 '14 at 14:22
4

For windows users there is Windows XP Mode which allows you to run multiple versions of IE on a Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate edition.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/02/04/testing-multiple-versions-of-ie-on-one-pc.aspx

balupton
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i_am_jorf
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  • edited as while useful, it's not the definitive answer. Not everyone uses windows as their host operating system. – balupton Feb 08 '11 at 06:29
4

I've been struggling with this problem for a while. Virtualization would be a good solution, but it's too slow for my needs. A laptop can only handle so much: running a development environment alongside Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and then trying to do virtualization while connected to a plethora of servers and with a lot of other things going on in the background is... well... slow.

I have the following setup now that solves the problem gracefully, although it is a bit expensive, it's worth it:

  • One Macbook connected to an external display
  • One Windows desktop, with Windows XP and Windows Vista installed dual boot

Both machines run Synergy, sharing the keyboard and mouse across machines, so I can easily switch between the two. Since they're separate computer I don't have any performance issues and can happily Photoshop along on my Mac while my Windows machine still has each and every browser running.

This setup covers most of browsers in graded browser support as defined by Yahoo! http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/:

Browsers:

  • Firefox 2 Mac
  • Firefox 3 Mac
  • Firefox 3 windows
  • Firefox 2 Windows
  • Webkit nightly Mac
  • Safari 3 Windows
  • Safari 4 Mac
  • Google Chrome Latest version Windows
  • Opera latest version Windows
  • Opera latest version Mac
  • Internet Explorer 6 (on the XP part of the Windows machine)
  • Internet Explorer 8 w/ IE7 compatibility mode (on the Vista part of the Windows machine)

E-mail clients covered:

  • Apple Mail
  • Thunderbird == Firefox rendering engine (on the XP machine)
  • Outlook Express == IE6 rendering engine
  • Outlook 2003 (on the XP machine)
  • Outlook 2007 (on the Vista machine)
  • All the popular web clients on all the browsers mentioned above (Live mail, Gmail, Yahoo! mail)

Things this setup doesn't cover:

  • I don't have Mac OS 10.4
  • I only test the latest version of Opera, not any earlier versions (due to it's small userbase)
  • I test Safari 3 and Safari 4, both one on Windows and one on the Mac, not both versions on both platforms. Now, Safari 4 is still in beta anyway; and Safari always has and had a very good rendering engine.
  • As for e-mail clients, I've never bothered testing Lotus Notes

You can check out a video of the setup here.

Wolfr
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I use Virtual PC to run an instance of windows where I have IE6 installed. It's a bit clumsier than having different versions in the same computer, but it's a 100% working IE6. Multiple IE works fine for most testing, but it's lacking that last few percents.

Don't work too much to get the page looking right in IE8, it still has some glitches that most likely will be fixed in the final release.

Guffa
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Run IE6, IE7, and IE8 on the Same Machine Using Windows 7 XP Mode

http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/ie6-ie7-ie8-win7-xp-mode

Jitendra Vyas
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This does not directly answer your question, but have you had a look at Litmus? We tend to use it mostly for testing HTML/CSS compatibility across multiple browsers (supported by Litmus).

ayaz
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  • @ayaz I didn't know about Litmus, but in this case I would need a service to which I can connect with VNC (or similar), which provides multiple machines on different servers from which I can hit my application. – avernet Feb 22 '09 at 06:53
2

I've installed Virutal PC according to Donavon's tutorial but it seems that my laptop's BIOS doesn't support Hardware Virtualization, and it's required to run Virtual PC. So, make sure your equipment supports that before you go any further wirh Virtual PC.

migueltonic
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Somewhat related, you should consider running your site past BrowserShots when it is almost done, see how it looks in dozens of browsers on hundreds of configurations.

Sparr
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2

Use Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image.

Download it from Microsoft Download Center link

IsmailS
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2

VMWare Player is a free alternative to Oracle VirtualBox and Microsoft VirtualPC. As with the mentions of VirtualBox you'll need to create your own images of OS+browser, though. VMWare Player is here: http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

James McLachlan
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Someone I know created a portable version of IE8 using thinstall (now it's bought by vmware and called thinapp) (only 1.8 MB). Thinstall creates a virtualized application with a virtual filesystem builtin and is the perfect solution to DLL hell. The whole app runs from a single exe file.

This is untested against other versions install, I might add.

http://rapidshare.com/files/247957494/IE8.Portable.Thinstall.exe

1

On my Mac OS X machine I use Sun's VirtualBox wich is free.

I run 3 WinXP virtual boxes and assign 256K to each. See this tutorial:

http://www.10voltmedia.com/blog/2008/12/screencast-install-internet-explorer-on-osx-using-virtualbox/

gdelfino
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Adobe BrowserLab.

Joseph Weissman
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Multiple IE http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE Will install ie up to 6, without disrupting current installation (i have 7 and it left it as it is). Now I need to find a way to run 8 on top of all that. 6 and 7 already run fine thanks to that little app above. (only tested on XP)

rolfen
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A colleague of mine recommended Internet Explorer Collection. It appears to work without issues, but I'm far from a power user. It also supports installing IE 1 (!!) through 8.

Mike Cornell
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What about using App-V? http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/appv/default.mspx

In particular Dynamic Application Virtualization http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/appv/dynamic.mspx

It virtualizes at the application level. It is useful when running incompatible software on the same OS instance.

PaulWaldman
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  • @PaulWaldman Have you use that already? It seems to solve a larger problem than the one I have. – avernet Feb 22 '09 at 07:01
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Firefox has an add-in that will render a webpage the same as if it was in Internet Explorer 5.5/6/7/8 beta 2.

IE NET Renderer

Edit: This looks like it only does screenshots so it may not be very useful. Good for making sure your layout isn't broken, but not much else.

Peter Mortensen
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WalterJ89
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  • @WalterJ89 Thank you for the link. But from what I read, IE NET Renderer only does screenshots, and so doesn't work for interactive applications. – avernet Feb 22 '09 at 07:04
  • sorry i did not notice that. may work for quickly checking that your layout isn't broken though. – WalterJ89 Feb 22 '09 at 07:44
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As Eduardo mentioned, the recently announced Microsoft SuperPreview is a tool that lets you view how web pages are rendered in many different browsers, even if they aren't installed locally.

For example, you can see how your page looks in Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Firefox, and Safari, even if you don't have those browsers installed.

Peter Mortensen
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Judah Gabriel Himango
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Try using IE Tab .. Firefox / Chrome Extension
http://www.ietab.net/home

Amitd
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Here is the official microsoft VM images for doing IE 6, 7, 8 and 9 testing: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=11575

Dan K.K.
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I found a new tool that makes this Really REALLY easy.

Use IE9 Developer mode. push F12.

Up in the File Menu, you can see Browser Version: IE9, click here and you can change the browser version all the way back to 7. For 6 you will still need a virtual PC.

Nathan24
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Microsoft now offers virtual images that you can use in your choice of software to run IE8 and other legacy software!

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=11575

A fairly large download but works wonderfully! (Requires a valid version of Windows 7 to work fwiw).

bobber205
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There is also CrossBrowserTesting, which supports many browsers, seems to work without installing any plugins on your computer, and also includes a very neat layout comparison tool.

CrossBrowserTesting was advertised from within Browsershots.

Denilson Sá Maia
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Also have a look at Microsoft's Compatibility Inspector, which will give you warnings of issues that will affect your sites backwards compatibility.

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/html5/compatinspector/

David d C e Freitas
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The best and probably only solution is probably IE tester that could be found at ietester[dot]com It uses the IEengines for all IE 6, 7 and 8! And I have not found any discrepancies yet!

Tumharyyaaden
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To check all versions of Internet Explorer you can go to codecpack.nl and install all versions of Internet Explorer, that is, IE collection.

Or you can use www.multibrowserviewer.com. It can check in 45 browsers and 3 OSes.

Peter Mortensen
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Baljeetsingh Sucharia
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