44

Possible Duplicate:
Running Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 8 on the same machine

In order to test web pages,

currently my page works file with my IE,

but not with others.

Is it possible to have multiple versions installed ?

Community
  • 1
  • 1
omg
  • 136,412
  • 142
  • 288
  • 348
  • A good article here of comparing different ways to test different versions of IE. Hope it will be useful to you: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/09/reliable-cross-browser-testing-part-1-internet-explorer/ – Jennie Ji Sep 04 '15 at 03:21

4 Answers4

40

MultipleIE , IETester there are many similar to those.

Multiple IE supports IE3 IE4.01 IE5 IE5.5 and IE6 and "is no longer maintained and there are no plans to continue maintaining it! Thanks and good luck!".

IETester seems a better choice : IE10, IE9, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 8 desktop, Windows 7, Vista and XP

Danubian Sailor
  • 1
  • 38
  • 145
  • 223
x4tje
  • 1,633
  • 1
  • 15
  • 17
  • 13
    **Multiple IE** supports **IE3 IE4.01 IE5 IE5.5 and IE6** and **"is no longer maintained and there are no plans to continue maintaining it! Thanks and good luck!"**, **IETester** seems a better choice : **IE10, IE9, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 8 desktop, Windows 7, Vista and XP** – Julien Jan 24 '13 at 10:03
  • 4
    IETester continually crashes using IE9 when trying to view my current project. Other websites is fine, so may be worth trying for others, but still; frustrating for me at the moment! – Owen McAlack Sep 13 '13 at 02:34
21

I would use VMs. Create an XP (or whatever) VM using VMware Workstation or similar product, and snapshot it. That is your oldest version. Then perform the upgrades one at a time, and snapshot each time. Then you can switch to any snapshot you need later, or clone independent VMs based on all the snapshots so you can run them all at once. You probably want to test on different operating systems as well as different versions, so VMs generalize that solution as well rather than some one-off solution of hacking multiple IEs to coexist on a single instance of Windows.

nosatalian
  • 6,889
  • 4
  • 20
  • 16
  • 5
    This is the real answer. Using stuff like IETester is great if you don't need it to be really professional - but you are *not* testing IE. You're testing a product attempting to mimic IE. – B T Jun 28 '13 at 00:36
  • Or Virtual Box: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads – Roman Holzner May 29 '14 at 21:00
  • 2
    This is *not* the real answer when you need to debug hardware acceleration in CSS transforms and transitions. Virtual machines will handle those in software. – instanceofnull Apr 24 '15 at 13:00
6

You can use IETester (http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage)

janhartmann
  • 14,713
  • 15
  • 82
  • 138
6

To answer your question: no, it's not possible to have multiple versions of IE (if that is what you meant) installed in a 'normal' way (i.e. not a hack, a sandbox or a VM etc). It's perfectly ok to have multiple browsers of different types installed on the same machine, such as IE8, Firefox 3 and Chrome all at once.

SandboxIE should allow you to install multiple versions of IE side-by-side (as well as other software), and this is less hassle than going down the virtual machine route.

However, from a QA point of view I'd strongly recommend installing different versions on different machines as the best option from a testing point of view. This will give you the most realistic testing environment. If you don't have the hardware for that, then virtual machines are the next best option as mentioned in some of the other answers.

Xiaofu
  • 15,523
  • 2
  • 32
  • 45