Internet Explorer Testing
Posted on 2008-12-08 [direct link]
I'm notorious for writing HTML that either "just about works" in Internet Explorer, or (more often than not) doesn't work at all. This is basically down to lazy testing, I have no easy access to Internet Explorer and don't really know very much about its hopelessly insane ideas regarding CSS rendering.
When a particularly nasty bug gets reported I normally resort to a borrowed laptop or a virtual installation of Windows running uder VMWare. But I've always had a love/hate relationship with VMWare and generally view it as a clunky monstrosity. Recently I remembered that my new(ish) CPU claims to support proper virtualizaion which opens up a lot more options for the Windows-on-Linux marriage from hell. After a lot of mucking around I ended up with Sun's VirtualBox, and it does the job really, really well.
Installation is easy and doesn't require anything like the level of deep integration that VMWare has always demanded. The virtual machines are low overhead and responsive. I like it, in fact I like it a lot.
The neatest trick is the "seamless" mode, which lets you have windows from your guest operating system co-existing with those from your host operating system. This is very handy and works well with the automatic clipboard syncing and other tricks. So now I can have a whole secret Windows instance running all the time, but have it totally hidden except from a single Internet Explorer window. I can just paste URLs into the IE window whenever I want to test something and forget about it the rest of the time. Very handy indeed.
Posted on 2008-12-08 [direct link]
I'm notorious for writing HTML that either "just about works" in Internet Explorer, or (more often than not) doesn't work at all. This is basically down to lazy testing, I have no easy access to Internet Explorer and don't really know very much about its hopelessly insane ideas regarding CSS rendering.
When a particularly nasty bug gets reported I normally resort to a borrowed laptop or a virtual installation of Windows running uder VMWare. But I've always had a love/hate relationship with VMWare and generally view it as a clunky monstrosity. Recently I remembered that my new(ish) CPU claims to support proper virtualizaion which opens up a lot more options for the Windows-on-Linux marriage from hell. After a lot of mucking around I ended up with Sun's VirtualBox, and it does the job really, really well.
Installation is easy and doesn't require anything like the level of deep integration that VMWare has always demanded. The virtual machines are low overhead and responsive. I like it, in fact I like it a lot.
The neatest trick is the "seamless" mode, which lets you have windows from your guest operating system co-existing with those from your host operating system. This is very handy and works well with the automatic clipboard syncing and other tricks. So now I can have a whole secret Windows instance running all the time, but have it totally hidden except from a single Internet Explorer window. I can just paste URLs into the IE window whenever I want to test something and forget about it the rest of the time. Very handy indeed.
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[2008-12-08 at 11:28 (updated once)]
[views: 1332]
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