Comments on: Testing IE Versions Just Got a Little Easier

By: MattFoster

MattFoster — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:08:09 +0000

Talk about a blessing, once IE7 came out you’d think our IE6 woes were over but far from it, and as I had upgraded to IE7 I quickly realized that my audience hadn’t and my new CSS techniques came out as blunderous errors for anyone viewing through IE6, thanks for this contribution!!

By: jfrabaute

jfrabaute — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:28:29 +0000

@vsync: multipleIEs is not working on Vista :-O

By: vsync

vsync — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 07:02:48 +0000

whats wrong with “multipleIEs” ?
I’m using it and its great.

By: jfrabaute

jfrabaute — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 18:38:32 +0000

@Nosredna: Yes this is a known problem I am working on.

By: Nosredna

Nosredna — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:49:09 +0000

I had IE6 cookie problems yesterday. That’s a known bug?

By: jfrabaute

jfrabaute — Fri, 30 May 2008 12:00:51 +0000

@indiehead : Please feel free to send me the differences (url where I can see the problem), so I can correct the bugs on future versions.

Thanks.

By: indiehead

indiehead — Fri, 30 May 2008 11:02:38 +0000

this is good but i had some problems under Vista, sometimes it doesn’t display exactly as a real ie6 would; but good attempt.

for now the best option is to use VirtualPC with Microsoft’s IE6 Virtual Machine (expires end of july), that way you know for sure how things look as your running a real copy of ie6 in the background.

for linux users, there’s ie4linux which works really well, and is pretty spot-on for browser compatability tests; plug in the 3d desktop and you’ve got a pretty sleek testing environment.

another fave of mine is x-ray, great for safari 2 debugging.

By: alex94040

alex94040 — Fri, 30 May 2008 08:49:42 +0000

Excellent tool – thank you! I’d love to see Firefox integrated as well, plus some nice-to-haves that were mentioned before:
1) a way to compare-and-contrast the differences in rendering between two tabs (through computed style or somehow else)
2) a way to create a “profile” – for example, i care about ie 7 and 6, but not ie8, so that all pages that i open in one tab are also opened in all others.
3) integration with firefox/safari. I think this tool would be a great cross-browser rendering platform long-term.
4) integration with automated test tools like Selenium TestRunner – shouldn’t be too difficult, it’s just a matter of polishing the JS OM (doesn’t work right now).

Thanks again, looks very promising.

By: jfrabaute

jfrabaute — Fri, 30 May 2008 07:06:53 +0000

@mmastro: I already tried to correct the problem without success.
I will work on it until I correct it.
Same for other bugs like java applets, cookies on IE6, etc…

Meanwhile, I am releasing new version so users can have other minor bugs corrected and improved interface with their requested changes (refresh all, customizable homepage, etc…)

Stay tuned ;-)

By: matanlurey

matanlurey — Fri, 30 May 2008 02:32:33 +0000

@jfrabaute: Thanks so much for your continual work. It makes IE a little more human for us developers!

By: mmastro

mmastro — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:28:45 +0000

jfrabaute: What about Flash not working on IE6 instance? Will you fix this in future release?

By: jfrabaute

jfrabaute — Thu, 29 May 2008 15:31:22 +0000

@Dan: I will handle this using a “duplicate tab” menu entry. So you will be able to duplicate a tab in another IE instance tab.

Having one 1 address bar driving all tabs could be limitative as sometimes the user would like to open another page, even in a test environment.

Anyway, I will try to do my best to improve the way web developers can test their sites faster using IETester on future releases, so all feedbacks like yours are welcome.

@Andy: Good point on this one. Not so simple to implement as display, but I will think of it.

JFR

By: Dan G. Switzer, II

Dan G. Switzer, II — Thu, 29 May 2008 15:02:09 +0000

I’d rather see one URL box and then automatically see different tabs for the different versions of IE. The odds are you’re using this tool for one purpose–to test out the same page/site to make sure everything is working correctly. So, I’d like to see a single URL address box that would change the location of all IE tabs.

By: Andy

Andy — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:46:56 +0000

jfrabaute: Excellent. Another good feature would be if you could crosscheck the elements computed styles between the versions to display the differences.

By: Nosredna

Nosredna — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:42:57 +0000

I’ve used this for awhile and it’s worked perfectly for me. I love it.

By: ScottJehl

ScottJehl — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:36:21 +0000

Great tool! Looking forward to Companion.JS integration.
Thanks!

By: jfrabaute

jfrabaute — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:02:05 +0000

@Andy : I am planning to integrate DebugBar and Companion.JS into IEtester so you will have a debugger tool to debug all IE instances into one tool.

Stay tuned.

By: Danie Luz

Danie Luz — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:58:25 +0000

That looks way cool, but just rendering is hardly enough when things don’t show up as you expect or a cryptic JScript error message pops up. Does it work nicely with debugging tools? Being from the same guy behind DebugBar, my hopes are up. And hopefully the script debuggers will hook without any problems, as they seem to work on standalone IE6.

I’ll certainly try this one next time I’m on Windows testing.

By: Andy

Andy — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:52:27 +0000

Kind of useless if it doesn't come with any debugging options. If it just comes to checking differences between versions, I'd rather use Net Renderer.

By: Diodeus

Diodeus — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:45:44 +0000

Yay! Thank you J.F. This is awesome. Now I can retire that old P-733 that’s hogging my desk that I kept kicking around for IE6 testing.