Wow. This has been a great thread. Lots of good ideas coming in. Obviously this is a pain point for a lot of us.
Here's the breakdown of my results for each suggestion: 1) Using wine: I which I could trust it, but I can't. I got IE 7 working on my machine, and it was super unstable, and it looked very different as an app than it does on PCs. There could be some value in using it for initial testing, but then I feel like you'd have to still find a real PC and test again. 2) Litmus: Possibly great for that final run through when you want to prove 90 or 100% compatibility across browsers to your boss. Doesn't work for testing ajaxy sites because you can only get a per-url screenshot. 3) VM Images available from microsoft: If you read the last couple of comments on the referenced blog, you'll see that these are now encumbered with license requirements if you try and convert them. ( http://www.russellheimlich.com/blog/walkthrough-setup-multiple-ie-virtual-machines-on-a-mac/ ) 4) ie4osx. This is the wine solution in a nice package for osx. Same problems as mentioned in number 1. 5) Using the Amazon cloud: This is legit and it works. Great solution. Cost is about $0.12/hr. No problems there. 6) VirtualBox: Looks like a great way to avoid paying for a Parallels license. However, we run into the same problem with the Microsoft VPC issues discussed in number 3. 7) Browserlab from Adobe: This offers the same core functionality as Litmus with a few extra bells and whistles. You still run into the issue of not being able to look deep into ajaxy sites and not being able to do real time 'poking around'. So, despite that the list is so long full of great possibilities, it looks like we have three options for my particular needs: 1) Borrow someone's PC for a while 2) Use Amazon or Browsercam to remote into a pc (to be fair there are probably a bunch of other remoting services) 3) Find someone that has an old copy of one of those VPCs that came from microsoft before they became license encumbered. I'm going with a mix of 1 and 2. Thanks again everyone, --Jon On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 9:00 AM, Zach Little <[email protected]> wrote: > Tweet from my friend @Merrick says this could help w/ cross browser > testing... > > https://browserlab.adobe.com/index.html > > Zach > > On Jan 15, 2010 6:27 AM, "Thibaut Barrère" <[email protected]> > wrote: > > I've had google luck running the Microsoft provided VPC (as described > here > http://www.russellheimlich.com/blog/walkthrough-setup-multiple-ie-virtual-machines-on-a-mac/ > ) > under VirtualBox. > > Back when I did it, the tricky part wasn't running one of these VPC, > but the second one (some VHD id duplicate issues if I recall well). > > Very quick, launch instantly - I stopped using Parallels once I had > that. > > -- Thibaut > > -- > > SD Ruby mailing list > [email protected] > http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby > > > -- > SD Ruby mailing list > [email protected] > http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby >
-- SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby
