Testing IE in a VM (when you don't have Windows)

[fu]

I stumbled across this useful article which describes how you can quickly set up a VM to run IE:
Internet Explorer for Mac the Easy Way: Run IE 7, IE8, & IE9 Free in a Virtual Machine

Article just mentions a Mac, but Virtual Box also works on Linux, and so do the bash scripts.

Be warned that that it's not all that magic: it makes it easy to set up a testing environment, but it doesn't eliminate the need to have the entire Windows OS downloaded and running in a virtual machine, so you *do* need hard drive space, a decent internet connection, and decent RAM to support all those. Following these instructions will download the entire Windows OS three times, in ~700MB chunks. Right now they're taking up > 40GB on my hard drive; I didn't have enough space on my laptop, so I had to tweak the command from the article to install them to an external hard drive:

curl -s https://raw.github.com/xdissent/ievms/master/ievms.sh | INSTALL_PATH="/my/external/harddrive" bash


Also, even though the images are officially from Microsoft and for testing, they don't count as genuine, so you get the annoying Windows Genuine popups and warnings. Just ignore them and move on with your day -- and testing!

Comments

[kareila]

Thanks for posting this, it's pretty much the only thing I use Windows for so it's nice to have a solution that doesn't involve maintaining a Windows box!