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Comment by marijn | Hacker News Reader

As an aside, does anyone know of a way to install this alongside IE9 on a testing machine? I should have started testing in IE10 months ago, but I'm loath to set up a separate VM for every IE version.

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Sorry, separate VM's are the only way.

But I use VirtualBox and take advantage of "snapshots" -- this way I have a virtual hard drive with "XP" and separate snapshots with IE6, 7, and 8 installed. And I have a separate virtual hard drive with Windows 8 installed, with separate snapshots for IE8, 9, and now 10.

This way you can save a LOT of disk space. And as a side benefit, once you set your snapshot point, every time you switch between snapshots, you lose the VM history since the snapshot, so you can start testing sites with a "clean" version of IE everytime, uncluttered with cache, history, etc.

+1 for this. We just set up 20 of our people with this set up. With Hyper-V built into Windows 8, it's actually quite pleasant (compared to dealing with VMware).

That's a great approach. Thanks.

IE dev tools allows you to switch the browser renderer to any version you want that is higher than 6.

Note, however, that this is not the same as the real browser engine - there are key areas which still perform like the native version. As an example, IE8 in IE7 compatibility mode will throw JavaScript exceptions if you try to set invalid styles on a DOM element but real IE7 silently ignores the error.

I don't recommend this approach since it is quite unreliable, as shown here:

http://stackoverflow.com/a/11418046/237244

http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

Use "default" for IE10 (the IE10 button stays greyed-out which is confusing)

I like Browserstack. I used it before modern.ie endorsed it and I've been fairly happy with the results. In the beginning it locked up a bunch, but it has gotten better and better

https://github.com/xdissent/ievms#installation

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