Saturday, August 21, 2010

Testing with IE 6 (on Linux!)

I have a requirement from a client to ensure that their website looks good in IE6.  None of the machines I normally work on have IE6 installed. So I googled IE6 emulators as I had used one in the past that was pretty good, and came up with:
http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE 
and
http://www.browsercam.com/
However you have to sign up to get a free time trial and I thought maybe there was something better for me out there.  Some of the forums talked about having an old laptop that they keep around just for testing with IE6.  I do have an old desktop running XP, so I checked it.  It turned out I have been keeping up with all the updates for the most part and one of the service packs (I don't remember if it was 2 or 3) installed IE7.  Bummer. 
Googling a bit more, I discovered that you can install IE6 on Linux.  Pushing against this thread a bit more, I found this site:
http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page
and went to this page:
http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Installation:Fedora
followed the directions and IE6 was installed and running, properly displaying my client's website within 10 minutes.  The Tatanka gives you the option to install IE5.5 and IE5 as well, but when I tried them, the installations were corrupt.  Since IE6 was all I really needed, I was happy with leaving things the way they stood.

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