Can anyone make a recommendation on testing on later IE versions?
Free is best. Seeing one that charges 19.95 per day, but I need one I can dip into every now and then.
Here’s one that seems to work, but this is basically picking one out of the hat. IE NetRenderer - Browser Compatibility Check -
There’s IEtester, which does the job but is pretty unstable (it will crash several times a day out of the blue) or (if you’re on win7 professional, enterprise or ultimate) you can use Windows XP mode to set up multiple Windows virtual machines running different versions of IE (see [url=http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/02/04/testing-multiple-versions-of-ie-on-one-pc.aspx]Testing Multiple Versions of IE on One PC - IEBlog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs). Microsoft even offers VHDs for free, which are very easy to install (see http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=11575), although you have to download and re-install every once in a while because the VHDs expire. But it beats creating your own.
I use the latter (on a win7 ultimate x64 machine w/ 4GB RAM, 512MB per VM) and it works fine.
Any ideas on NetRenderer, originally posted?
Looks like a convenient solution.
Go grab a copy of virtualBox, hunt around for a dead laptop or outdated XP machine that still has the XP sticker on it for a key – install XP in virtualBox under your favorite pet OS, and done.
you can even make multiple installs to test multiple versions native.
I test 9 native on Win7, It’s IE8 testing mode seems trustworthy enough – but have separate XP installs in VB for 6 & 7… and a 98 install with 5.5 and IE6 as there are some behavioral differences between 98 IE6 and XP IE6.
Emulators can get you close, but setting up VMs is the most accurate.
Go the IE Tester route mentioned above before resorting to NetRenderer as it can be brutally slow or have surprise down times.