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Comment by sosuke | Hacker News Reader

In case you weren't already aware, Microsoft provides free images of XP and Vista with IE 6, 7 and 8. You have to get a new image every few months but they work great for making sure this doesn't happen. Only takes a few seconds to boot up the virtual pc and check your layout and functionality.

http://www.microsoft.com/Downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21e...

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But last I tried to use them (a month or so ago) they no longer work in anything other than MS Virtual PC. VirtualBox, VMWare, etc wouldn't work. So, now you need to be on a Windows PC to use their images.

typical.

What about running virtual pc from my parallels xp virtual machine? Two levels of indirection might kill my performance but should be ok to just test basic sites.

I tried this with VMWare Fusion on a Mac running XP and couldn't get the MS VirtualPC images to work. Anyone have success running VPC with these test images in a VM (VirtualBox, Parallels, Fusion?) on OS X?

I was saying using a virtual machine inside another running virtual machine. Two running emulators.

Unfortunately the images from the site have activation issues because they see it as being installed on new hardware, someone from MS posted on the VirtualBox forum suggesting an email to see if the demand was high enough and I guess it hasn't reached that point yet. http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=21712&#...

For my own system I used MSDN to get working installs of XP on my Mac in VirtualBox.

You also need to convert the VHD to VDI. I've done this on Mac using Q (http://www.kju-app.org/) and these simple commands.

/Applications/Q.app/Contents/MacOS/qemu-img convert -O raw -f vpc "input.vhd" temp.bin

VBoxManage convertdd temp.bin "output.vdi"

Microsoft have recently released Super Preview - a very handy (and free) browser tester. You can compare IE6,7 and 8 side by side.

Download it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8e6...

Super Preview sucks - its basically an app wrapped around a service like browsershots.org. All you get are flat screenshots, which isn't enough.

You're going to need to find a way to test on a real version of the app. Xenocode(.com) used to have sandboxed versions of all the browsers available, which was perfect, but they've since removed the page. So now the images provided by MS (referenced in parent) are your best best.

Xenocode just moved it, and they linked to the new page from the old one:

http://spoon.net/Browsers/

Unfortunately they now require a plugin and launch from the web, they used to offer an exe of each browser you could download. Its too bad, was one of the best tools available for browser testing.

Ah - I'd always used the browser launch version, I wasn't aware they had .exe downloads.

I still think it's invaluable - rather than setting up three separate VMs, I can just have one on IE6, and launch 7/8 as needed (I usually just save-state at that point so I'm not constantly launching them).

That sucks. I'm not sure how the images are supposed to expire - I'm using year old images in VirtualBox and while I occasionally get messages saying Windows cannot be authenticated I'm still able to use them.

Mine still work, you have to go through a few hoops to convert them, but I have them working in VirtualBox fine.

I think the howto to convert them I found on stackoverflow or something, can't remember now.

I have XP_IE6, XP_IE7, XP_IE8 working fine.

Talk to Pete LePage, a Microsoft Product Manager for Internet Explorer. He's working on the issue - http://blogs.msdn.com/petel/archive/2009/09/09/running-the-i....

I have been using IETester for some time now. It can give you all the IE versions up from 5.5

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

There is also IETester. http://my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

IETester can't be trusted. It's prone to strange bugs that don't appear in the standalone versions of IE.

the easiest way probably is to use the standalone versions of all ie's

Can all version of IE's exist on the same PC at same time?

In the form of IETester, yes. Otherwise, I believe no, except through virtual machines.

Yup. http://finalbuilds.edskes.net/iecollection.htm

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