Hacker News Reader

Ugh! Why not use ie 9 instead?

As the site made clear, these are useful for developers that want a quick way to test that their site works in multiple older versions of IE.

Ie9 allows you to switch the display mode between IE7, IE8, IE9. However, it does not allow IE6.

Also, I'm not yet certain how accurate the older modes are. I did write some code with a known IE7 bug that worked fine in 8 & 9... and which I switched IE9 to IE7 mode the bug occurred as I had expected it to. (Press F12 in IE9 to see the option to select display mode). Apologies if this sounds kind of rambly, as I just woke up...

Downloading these either way so that I can do some additional testing.

For the most part the compatibility modes work, but there are inconsistencies - such as bugs that appear in IE7, but not in IE8 in compatibility mode. Its a headache, and one that's somewhat remedied by just using the actual browsers.

Thanks for the info. That's what I was hoping to find out by having these. They now live happily within my suite of various development/testing tools.

Does Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview (Microsoft's official tool for this purpose, which comes with the various rendering engines plugged into a meta-browser) have these same deficiencies?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com