Testing your web pages/sites in multiple versions of IE has always been a pain. Mostly because you can only have one version of IE installed on your computer at a time (yes, I know there are some hacks you can use to have more than one installed, but they are buggy, prone to crashing and dont give you accurate results). And, if you upgrade your XP installation to SP3, it comes with IE7 with no ability to downgrade back to version 6.
I have long been a proponent of using Microsoft’s Virtual PC and their free Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Images. These allow you to run virtual machines with XP and a specific version of IE (6, 7 or 8; no version of 5.5 available). While this works and is certainly handy, it means that if you want to see how your site looks on all the versions simultaneously, you will have to load up at least two VM’s. Depending on how much system memory your computer has, this can bog things down quite a bit. There’s also the annoying fact that these VM’s expire every 3 months.
So the method works, but it still leaves a lot to be desired. Looks like someone felt the same way, but actually had the know-how and motivation to do something about it!
Released earlier this year, IETester allows you to view your site in IE version 5.5, 6.0, 7.0 and 8.0 beta1 all within a single “window” in different tabs. You can now quickly tab through all 4 versions of IE to see how they compare!
Note that this is alpha software, so don’t be surprised if you experience some bugginess. For example, when I switched from tabs to a side-by-side comparison (similar to the image above) and tried to scroll horizontally, the screen for that IE version went blank and took about 10 seconds to come back. But once they can get these minor annoyances worked out, I can see IETester easily becoming a top-10 indispensable WebDev tool.
