Test versions of IE from 6 through 11 and Microsoft Edge using virtual machines | Hacker News Reader

Test versions of IE from 6 through 11 and Microsoft Edge using virtual machines

dev.modern.ie

212 pointsmfontani121 comments

I've tried Virtual Machines like this before and found that while they work great they're clunky, take up precious space, and I need to test with many versions. I've tested a few paid solutions (Ghostlab, Browserstack, Cross Browser Testing) and so far am sticking with Browserstack. I have absolutely no association with any of these websites, only clients who demand their websites work in archaic versions of Internet Explorer :P

I do still use the IE VMs for testing, and I even use a real PC for further testing once the website is "ready". Just lately been preferring to quickly test while developing in my browser without worrying about spinning up a VM or anything.

You can save a lot of disk space if you'll use backing files. E.g you can have one base Windows disk image that used by any number of VMs configured differently. So you basically only need like 5-15GB for compressed Windows image and then each VM configuration will only take another 1-2GB at most.

Personally use it with QEMU / KVM now, but totally sure VMWare had backing files support too.

I guess the problem there is that you need different Windows versions too – and they're all pretty chunky! It definitely helps though, and AFAIK all virtualisation tools have support.

I believe that Windows 7 would be enough for anything except Edge. E.g you can install IE6 in XP compatability mode for sure.

Suppose there may be issues with crap like ActiveX, but most of people I know just worry about how page looks like and I don't believe rendering of IE11 on Win7 and Win8 would be different. Though I'm not expert.

Just curious, how do you install IE6 in Win7?

By using the "XP Mode" VM.

So, that is not installing IE6 in Win7. That's installing IE6 in WinXP that's running as a VM in Win7.

Gee, I just recently hated upon Qemu/KVM for not having the equivalent of Hyper-V differencing disks! Great to know this exists as this will save me quite a bit of disk space on my CentOS VMs.

VMware supports "parent" vmdk files. The leaf-node "child" vmdk will diff based on the ancestors. VMware Player does support this. The VMware implementation of XPMode uses it. You can use vdiskmanager to convert the root vmdk to sparse files, which leaves the main vmdk file with just the configuration in it. This makes it much easier to set up the parent-child relationship than monolithic vmdk.

I used to hate Browserstack due to latency but re-tried it recently and it's MUCH faster. If you've tried it before it's worth giving it another shot.

I've have the opposite opinion. I have found that space is a premium, even if I'm using 20gb for my VM's that's still a small portion of my Mac's SSD.

The biggest issue we had with Browserstack (and the like) was that it required us to tunnel through our proxy. Whilst I appreciate this simplifies testing localhosts, it made us all a bit nervous. Not to mention Browserstack's recent breach.

A VM is a small price to pay for an insulated and customisable testing environment. Plus some sites have the nice habit of badly crashing early IE versions, and recovery from that is quick on a VM.

Not to mention, with IE VM's we can install additional browsers (to enjoy the rendering differences in Windows and Mac Firefox versions). We can also customise IE to reflect the client's environments (for intranets or POS systems, etc). Pretty handy.

Browserling (https://www.browserling.com) is also an option.

My Virtualbox images from modern.ie have been sitting around collecting dust ever since I started using Browserstack. You can even use it to test HTML5 audio.

Haven't tried it yet, but I hear you can also use Browserstack for Selenium tests (https://www.browserstack.com/automate/php).

I'm happy that Microsoft provides these VM's and I hope other vendors (Hi Apple!) would provide VM's as well. So we can make sure the web is accessible for anyone regardless the browser they use.

That would totally go against Apple's business model. If Apple provided VMs for developers to test with they would lose 92.76%* of their Enterprise market.

* I made that number up.

Wishful thinking. They actually make an effort to make sure OSX is not virtualizable onto other platforms. We recently had a pretty long-winded discussion about this very problem:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9644773

That's not a problem. You can find WebKit powered browsers on any platform. It's the same WebKit used in Safari on OS X and iOS.

Now that Chrome is using Blink, what's the best WebKit option on Windows?

Yeah, I'm not sure what lucianmarin is talking about.

PhantomJS for headless testing? http://phantomjs.org/

> You can find WebKit powered browsers on any platform

lol what? The latest Safari version on Windows is 5.x and isn't even distributed officially by Apple anymore. And Safari is a bit more than just Webkit.

> That's not a problem

Yes it is.Without a mac, one can't test websites on Safari.

http://midori-browser.org/

Also worth noting: remote IE [1] can be used to test IE from a remote machine.

Would prevent from wasting disk space installing one window VM for each IE version to test...

Has anyone tried it? It's not clear from the site which version of IE is available from that service.

Too bad they don't have a linux client either :(

[1] https://remote.modern.ie/

I've tried it from my Mac. It's far more convenient than a VM. It runs IE 11.

it is running Edge... look at the version number closely ;) my experience with it: I have connection loses often with remote IE. It's not so good :(

It is NOT running Edge - it is running an "edge version" of IE.

http://stackoverflow.com/a/12530777

you are wrong. It is THE Edge browser. Test it yourself with http://html5test.com it reaches point scores which are not reachable for IE11. Also the browser identifies itself to other websites as Chromium browser like the Edge browser.

you've made me excited.

after 15 minutes fooling around I give up. the download in the mac app store fails with some network issue.

Contact us on rdios@microsoft.com and send us some details on your issue. Use as well the moderated Technet forum http://aka.ms/technet-rdc to post issues.

I've tried using the remote IE over RDP for OSX. It's horrible. It might work okay just to see if a site loads, but if you have any JS issues and to try and debug it locks up and quickly becomes unresponsive.

In the past they also provided Vagrant boxes. Some people also developed easy Vagrantfiles for them. See here in a official blog post http://blog.syntaxc4.net/post/2014/09/03/windows-boxes-for-v... Would be great if they will support Vagrant officially for Edge. Although https://github.com/xdissent/ievms/ is pretty close but not maintained good (last update last year). This is how I want to spin up IE VMs:

    vagrant init somwhere/edge
    vagrant up

I havent read about Vagrant yet. Is it similar to docker? Vmware? What is the big deal in Vagrant?

In short, Docker manages containers whereas Vagrant manages virtual machines.

Vagrant is just a command line interface to (headless) Virtualbox. That's all.

Makes provisioning and SSH logins a snap.

Vagrant isn't a CLI to virtualbox.

It's a tool for bringing up and managing (generally) headless virtual machines from a defined configuration.

It works with VirtualBox, Parallels and VMWare.

and hyperv! There are also plugins that allow deployment to (say) DigitalOcean.

We're providing the same IE/Edge versions at http://testingbot.com so people can instantly test from their browser with mouse&keyboard, without having to download the VMs

IE6 on Windows XP is 1 GB zipped. Microsoft Edge containing VM is 5 GB zipped.

All VMs expire:

"Please note that these virtual machines expire after 90 days. We recommend setting a snapshot when you first install the virtual machine which you can roll back to later."

They expire but you can, and they advise you to, snapshot and roll back. The purpose is to stop you just using it as a windows vm for doing work on.

This is probably obvious but worth noting anyway: remember to do the snapshot before you start the VM. The expiry countdown starts the first time you boot the VM and is date-based so the VM will expire even if you only used it once.

On the other hand, having a snapshot in a booted state gets you up and testing much quicker for subsequent runs. Even if it will expire after a while, you'll get one hour of work in before windows shuts down, and then you just restore the snapshot again.

Really? I'm pretty sure at least one of the VMs was completely locked down when booted up after it had expired. Not sure which version of Windows that was, though.

That said, what I generally do is to simply suspend the VM instead of resetting it to the snapshot. Then when it expires I can still do a reset to the snapshot to reset the expiry.

I generally boot at least the IE8 VM up before using it in order to install basic things like the Flash player (to test the Flash fallback for HTML5 media players).

That's what I meant :) You can't reboot after expiration.

What is the difference between saving the original ZIP file and doing the snapshot before starting the VM?

I think you need to do an import first, so it is faster to just rollback to a snapshot than re-import each time. I prefer snapshots so I can configure the network as needed for our corporate environment (saving me from doing that each and every time).

If you save the zip file you need to do the following:

1. extract the VM bundle

2. install and configure the VM (this is automated but can take up to several minutes)

3. boot up the VM

By using a snapshot you skip steps 1 and 2 and resetting a snapshot is pretty much instant, so you're only left with step 3.

The windows 7 ones allow you to re-arm the activation a number of times (I think it's up to 5 times?) using the `slmgr /rearm` command.

Does the windows 10 one not have this facility?

If I remember correctly you can in win7/8/8.1 and 2008/2012/2012R2, even the rearm limit I think there is a way to avoid it.

I have no shortage of disk space so I just keep the Zip files in the same folder as the VMs. Then when they expire it's a simple matter of extracting the Zip overwriting the files. This works nicely with Virtual PC because any virtual hardware configs made to the VM are kept external from the image and aren't overwritten.

Anyone monitoring high volume sites care to share the number of Edge users they are seeing visiting their site? - would be interesting to know the numbers a few weeks after the Win10 launch.

My stats show that this month (Aug 2015) Microsoft Edge is about 0.9% of total, and about 1.2% of Windows

Sure, here are my 2¢: Aggregated numbers for last week show Edge at 0,01% of the ~12.400.000 sessions. The numbers for yesterday show 0,31% of the ~1.700.000 sessions.

mine is not much popular, but 1.02% edge users this month.

On a global, general interest site I'm seeing it around ~0.4% currently.

One note: Google Analytics makes this harder to search for because they waited until a day or two ago to update their regex; until then Edge users were listed as Chrome 42.0.2311.135.OS on Windows NT.

I've been using this for the last 6 months as part of cross browser testing and it has been a life saver. The alternatives are even a bigger pain in the rear.

I have no idea who to thank but thank you.

It exists since a couple of years (before the departure of Balmer). You can thank Microsoft.

And https://github.com/xdissent/ievms for a hassle-free installation.

yes, this is a cool project. But unfortunately it is not using the latest images of all IEs and Edge is also not included yet although there is an issue for that https://github.com/xdissent/ievms/issues/263 . The maintainer does not update it regularly... last update last year. Also not compatible with VirtualBox 5.0.x. It screams for a fork ;)

They also do VM's for a number of android/windows phones which is useful for testing mobile devices.

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/features/msft-android-emu...

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/ff4025...

Are there issues with using this to test builds of desktop apps ?

I would like to test various Python apps on windows in an automated fashion.

not sure if officially/legally allowed (pretty sure not automated) but it's at least possible! :)

The relevant part of the conditions [1] simply state that

> You may use the software for testing purposes only. You may not use the software for commercial purposes. You may not use the software in a live operating environment.

So there's nothing inherently wrong with testing desktop apps, but the non-commercial clause may cause problems.

[1] http://modernievirt.blob.core.windows.net/vhd/release_notes_...

Cool! I've been testing open source apps in an adhoc fashion with these, but was worried about licensing.

I guess I can automate and document this now :)

IE has fallen below 5% on the sites I monitor. Why bother?

A lot of businesses are still forcing its employees to use IE.

They'll change when it becomes a big enough problem. That's how business works.

Don't encourage them by supporting old IE's.

For a lot of business owners using an old version of IE, the browser is something to facilitate their bespoke ActiveX application. They probably don't care if their employees can browse less sites.

And on the flip side, a lot of those employees are a sizeable chunk of business for other businesses when they browse on their lunch breaks or whatever. So, large sites aren't going to fully drop support for any browser until after the market share has dried up.

That's their problem. They'll install Chrome. Quit making excuses. I've heard it all a thousand times. Stop supporting old browsers today and business will adapt.

I think you're assuming that the employees in question are permitted to install software freely on their work computers, and/or that the company decision-makers are aware of new sites/services they're denying themselves by their policy.

Firstly, the policy is there for a reason -- often something like "we paid a lot in 2003 for this custom software, and if we upgrade browsers we'll have to pay X to have it rewritten/replaced".

X may be a rather large sum of money -- easily enough to overwhelm whatever benefits they might get by becoming paying customers of whoever's new venture.

There's also a potential for a sort of catch-22; new sites/services may pop up that could even replace their old custom-built software... but if they can't even try it out and the site looks awful on their browsers, a) it's less likely they'll make the jump and b) it gives the impression of being a new-fangled flash-in-the-pan sort of thing. After all, the serious companies online put the effort into supporting older browsers.

then dropping IE support is a good way to force them focus on the job instead of surfing on the web. ;-)

Sucks if your business's users are corporates and the CEO's PA books her bosses flights/hotels with a competitor

If they are really conservative, they surely book flights and hotels by phone, not web.

Except when your app is meant to be used by them for work and their IT has them stuck on an old version of IE.

I know that customer requirements are pretty much unheard of in startup land but other companies have to obey this kind of limitation in order to make any money (which again is an alien concept in startup land -- not every business model survives on growth alone).

As with all things, not every user is the same. The raw number of visitors using each browser is rather a useless metric for a lot of sites - you should be looking which browsers convert to sales more, click through adverts more, spend the most time on the website, etc. In my experience IE users are much more likely to complete an interstitial signup form or leave a site via a banner than Chrome or Firefox users. IE may have fewer users, but those users are much more valuable if you're building an ad-supported site.

Also, if you're making a substantial site with, say, 10 million MAUs, 5% of them is 500,000 people. That's a lot. Do you really want that number of people telling their friends "The site doesn't work for me"?

Not every site is about money. My numbers are actually closer to 3% than to 5%.

I could not care less.

If your point was "Why bother if you're building a site where the IE traffic is of no consequence?" then you should have said that. Obviously there's no point spending time and money writing code that no one benefits from, but that isn't the case for every site. Plenty of sites still need to work in IE because it will affect their income. If someone out there is writing a website whose only customer is an eccentric billionaire who spends $100m a year but insists on using Mosaic 2.0 on a dusty old 286, then they should be testing their updates on Mosaic.

Go where your customers are. If you don't have customers, do what you like. Although I'd question whether you even need a website if that's the case.

I do have customers: about 97% of them. I also provide free services as a gift to my local community ( Groningen ), just to give back.

I am not downloading GBs of VMs and spend hours of time to validate IE for a couple of illiterate smugs.

How does using IE make you an "illiterate smug"? Not everyone has a choice.

Some humility on your part might not go amiss treating your users like this is not very professional.

If 'a couple of illiterate smugs' represents 3% of your userbase then you only have 67 users to worry about. I don't think I'd do much optimisation for a site that small either.

;)

I know this is HN and everybody is building the next Facebook and has humongous numbers of users. But there is also local bands, volunteer ran music venues and such in a city of 200k tops. Which is apparently unworthy of HN. Noted.

I don't believe that's the case. Most startups, even YC startups, have no aspirations to be the next Facebook with it's billions of users. They just want to do as well as possible in their market. Every startup should aspire to serve it's customers as well as it possibly can - regardless of whether that's a couple of hundred thousand people or a couple of billion people.

But that has to include the all the customers, not just 97% of them. Start with the low-hanging fruit of course, but never settle for "those customers are too much effort to bother with". That sort of negative sentiment is toxic.

Indeed you may not care less, but a lot of people do. 80% of my visitors are on corporate locked-down machines running IE8-11.

I, and many others, do care. It is appreciated someone else sees the bother.

Right; in some cases it's not a personal decision.

We have a set of users who are using our site in healthcare environments, on locked-down computers that are difficult/expensive, so in some cases they're stuck on IE7/IE8.

I'm pretty sure calling them "illiterate smugs" wouldn't go over well.

On the other hand, these computers don't have access to the general internet, so in this case they don't risk running afoul of site creators who decide to be "clever" and go out of their way to aggressively (or even insultingly) demand that visitors upgrade. But restricted corporate users who hit that sort of thing would be unamused.

For a start, how do you know that the reason for the low usage isn't that they are broken in IE? You could be turning customers away.

You forgot the enterprise.

If you're looking at overall traffic, combining mobile, tablet, and desktop/laptop, that's probably in the ballpark of correct, but that simplistic measure isn't something I would allow to drive too many decisions.

If your site depends at all on user generated content (even comments), one active desktop/laptop user is probably worth hundreds or thousands of screenboard users. On my non-corporate-facing sites, IE is still 30+% of desktop usage, even though it's only 5-10% of overall usage.

Also, if you provide an untested experience to your IE users, you're probably bouncing many more users than you realize. Very few people return to a site that doesn't work in their default browser.

nb: I'm typing this in Chrome on a MBP.

I love these for testing sites and HTML emails in different versions of Outlook.

However, activation can be very annoying and lock a VM completely.

How much testing of HTML emails do you need ? Just bounce them back to the sender.

If you don't want to (or cannot) share the page to test with a third party there are client-only solutions like http://www.browseemall.com which take up less space and are more convenient than full blown VMs.

From the installation pdf:

"3. NO ACTIVATION.

To prevent its unlicensed use, the software contains activation enforcement technology. Because the software is licensed for testing use only, you are not licensed to activate the software for any purpose even if it prompts you to do so."

Makes sense to me. You can test absolutely everything without having to activate.

I don't question the possibility to test IE (under the limits they present).

The strange (or interesting) part is this "even if it prompts you to do so" not that they don't give you the license. You get the software that tells you something and you're not allowed to click what it tells you.

It suggests that the activation software, both client and server side, can't even be adjusted to manage the use cases intended by the release we discuss. What appears to be a software configuration problem (part of which is the 90 day expiration they give) is solved by the license (as in "you are not licensed").

I suppose that this is a somewhat stripped down version of Windows, and their concern is that either through bugs or through manipulations people could trigger the activation window in some manner.

Allowing people to activate Windows in this manner would simply make this software more work for the lawyers.

I think part of it is that if they deliberately stifle their own copy-protection, it might make it easier for malware or pirates to learn how they did it and do the same.

Guys... This is ancient.

But still valuable. It's also obvious from the comments that a few people here have never seen this before.

Which is quite surprising, I must add.

Do we have an easy way to get an account age breakdown by active account age?

I don't know and I don't think so. I'm pretty sure HN keeps their cards close to their chest with respect to stats. I hope to be proven wrong, though! It would be neat to peruse.

I wish they supported kvm for Linux rather than virtualbox.

Doesn't qemu have image converters?

I've used these images many times with qemu/kvm. No problem, just create a snapshot.

It's possible to convert virtualbox images to kvm.

This lets you run the images under KVM: https://github.com/lentinj/ie-vm

I haven't tried this yet but where was this 10+ years ago? I feel like its too late for a site like this, but I guess it will still be very useful.

They've been doing this for at least 5 years now.

This is the first time I've seen the .ie TLD (ireland) used in a technical context. It's a cool idea given the Microsoft context.

Why does Linux only have VirtualBox machines available? Linux has native support for VMware as well.

Old habits die hard. ;-)

You can just run the windows VMware VM on linux, so it doesn't matter much.

The latest IE11 update destroyed Win7 ("wininet.dll problem") on my work pc - QA on vacation? So such virtual machine images of IE will come handy.

Interesting. I'm wondering what other things all the VM's could be used for.

I also used them for a quick testing of Windows specific things (no Windows here... but this VMs make it easy to make a quick test).

Isn't it just bizarre how unbelievably bloated these windows systems are? 5 GB compressed image size, and nothing much usable in there but a broken browser.

This site should be renamed to "The Historical Horror Graveyard of Bad Computing Ideas" - go and show your students how operating systems should not work and how the ill-minded hierarchical-company-business-religion destroys creativity and good ideas and harmed human progress for much too long.

It is good to know that Windows 10 is the last Windows - may that prophecy fullfill itself quickly.

Windows actually got smaller with 10. Windows 7 is like 25 GB fully-updated, Windows 10 only 12 GB.

I suppose this could have something to do with it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Wi...

(There's no page for 10 yet but more features were removed.)

Amen. Thank the heavens for having choices in far superior computing environments.

I'm always shocked at what windows users have had to go through in the last 15 years.

I was getting warmed up to windows 10 but the recent privacy issues have got me cold again.

Not to mention that if the browser was separate from the OS, as it should be, you could just install all of them side-by-side.

I find it amazing that Ubuntu 15.04 is still under 700mb, but I suppose you have to install a lot of packages on first run anyway. I do doubt that it's 5gb worth though...

I think a good of that is because of backward compatibility and drivers.

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