I'm aware of a variety of stand-alone tools/web based services to facilitate this but with the exception of an occasional use of one or two, we haven't used these much.
My question here is how do you do this? What's your weapon of choice?
Please share what you can.
Addons like IE tab for firefox/chrome that simulate other browsers work decently well, but have some shortcomings. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/ie-tab-2-ff-3...
Compatibility testing often comes down to a compromise of picking the fewest combinations that cover the highest percentage of your audience. We tend to focus most of our time testing chrome for webkit (covers 99% of safari and opera issues), firefox, and IE on mac and pc. This covers the vast majority of our users, but we have to accept the fact that certain issues will slip through on less widely adopted browsers. Also, dropping support for IE6 cut our compatibility testing/fixing time dramatically.
> Also, dropping support for IE6 cut our compatibility testing/fixing time dramatically.
This is interesting. We've been thinking about this but haven't done much research on IE6 usage statistics - are you saying it has generally dropped so low that we can afford to stop testing with it?
I used this a while back when it first came out and it wasn't totally reliable (it failed to work with some IE6 png transparency hacks), but overall it was pretty good. It may have gotten better since then as well.
For now, I'm using IETester, buggy from time to time but gets the job done.
I'd advise you to test often while coding, this way you will avoid spaghetti layouts and you will be able to know what's creating problems with IE to avoid it in the future.
Have you (or others) tried their paid service? How good is that? Worth it or not?