Ok, so this may have been public knowledge for the general populace of mac geeks, but Derek just brought my attention to ies4osx via his post “Internet Explorer, Intel Macs need only apply.”
While we hate it with a passion, no mac-based web designer can claim to be professional without having 24/7 access to an Internet Explorer testing suite. Trust me, I tried. Whether you have a junky old PC box sitting around taking up space in your office, or you choose to go the dual-boot/virtualization method, it remains a sucky requirement. I personally upgraded my MBP to 4 gigs in in hopes of quelling Parallel’s memory hungry rampage, only to find it vanquished by Leopard: Wouldn’t run. While procrastinating about re-installing and configuring XP on my computer, I managed to only re-affirm my loathing for Internet Explorer.
For those who don’t know, not all browsers are created equal. In fact, few share in even the most basic behaviors. Back in the dark ages (we won’t count the prehistoric IE5.5 and below), there was Internet Explorer 6. With only the most basic support for CSS, and filled with security holes, IE6 claimed over 90% of the market in the early 2000’s. To this day, more than 60% of Playboy’s daily visitors are still running IE6. I know, right??
After much bitching and rioting, Microsoft finally got its gears in motion and started the necessary processes to churn out IE7. This time, they said, they would get it right. More support for standards, better performance, overall: less suck. 4 years later, the beta arrived. And it still sucked. Thankfully, during the interim, significantly better browsers like Firefox and Opera came along and stole our hearts. Unfortunately, the web isn’t comprised entirely of computer savvy netizens, and web designers are still forced to hack and intentionally break their code to accommodate that spoiled and entitled child that hate and Microsoft bred.
Honestly, while I’d been aware of the effort to port the Windows API to other OS’s (Darwine), I never took the time to play with it. As of today, you can install IE 7 through 5.0 on your mac with the click of a mouse (and an intel processor). Although not as good as my old install that dated back to IE 2 (!!!), this certainly gets the job done, and requires a fraction of the system resources. And like Derek says, “….there is no place like localhost.”
To get in on this action one needs:
- X11 - can be found in your developer tools that came with the install discs for your mac
- Darwine - Tiger users / Leopard users
- ies4osx - Where the magic happens
While I found the darwine install a little tedious (verification of the DMG failed on the first several attempts), Mike Kronenberg has unquestionably made IE testing less painful. And every little bit counts.