View your page in multiple versions of IE side-by-side

http://blogs.msdn.com/xweb/archive/2009/03/18/Microsoft-Expression-Web-SuperPreview-for-Windows-Internet-Explorer.aspx

by wayne • 17 years ago

42 17 17 years ago

blogs.msdn.com

yalurker• 17 years ago

Worth noting - There's a related service at http://browsershots.org/ where you can see how a webpage renders in a number of different OS & browser configurations. It's been very handy for me to make sure my designed-in-linux pages still looked decent to Mac/Windows users.

briansmith• 17 years ago

I downloaded it and tried it out and it was way too slow. For a simple, local, static web page, it took more than 3 seconds to see the results. It is much faster to run IE 6 in the VirtualPC image Microsoft provides.

Is this using some kind of online, BrowserShots-like service? I was expecting that it would have some specially-packaged internal version of IE6 inside of it, so that you would be using two local browsers that download the content through some kind of tee-like HTTP proxy (that is, everything downloaded once, and then sent to both browsers).

jeroen• 17 years ago

Seems like we still don't get to see ie7 and ie8 together, which makes this far from perfect. I'll stick with IETester for now and keep hoping that we can all drop support for IE6 soon.

nod• 17 years ago

Also, this is JUST snapshots! (DOM and image) They stop running Javascript after the onLoad, and then stop. Thus, you can't examine any sort of interactive element. I want my upvote back...

agotterer• 17 years ago

This is junk and has been uninstalled. Page loads are absurdly slow. The fact that you can't interact with the page renders it almost pointless. I can't believe its this difficult for M$ to make a worthwhile multi browser testing tool. I will stick with testing on multiple computers / standalone versions for now.

pierrefar• 17 years ago

250MB trial to test 3 lousy browsers? I'd prefer to display a message to my IE users to get a real browser.

evdawg• 17 years ago

It's not even 3 browsers. It's IE6 and IE7 or IE8... depending on which one you have installed on your machine. Which you can test anyways.

So really, it's a 250MB trial to test IE6. But not really test IE6. Just render images from IE6. Unacceptably slowly.

Sometimes it boggles my mind that software can be written this badly. I think this is a new low, even for Microsoft.

jamongkad• 17 years ago

Word...which is strange cuz I've heard that MS is a great place to work in especially for hackers.

alibosworth• 17 years ago

this is not really the same thing, but it can help: "Install multiple versions of IE on your PC" http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE

It hasn't been updated in a while, I really only use it to be able to run IE6 alongside IE7 (which i have installed in the normal way) for testing purposes.

chaosmachine• 17 years ago

Unfortunately, installing both IE6 and IE7 on the same machine causes IE6 to mishandle cookies, among other problems. You won't be able to log into many sites (Drupal sites, for example) when using this method.

seren6ipity• 17 years ago

There is firefox extension called IE NetRenderer to view pages in several versions of IE.

nixme• 17 years ago

Seriously, don't muck around with this...

Hands down the best solution is to load up a single Windows VM and install a bunch of these standalone, sandboxed browsers from Xenocode: http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/

You can test across IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari versions.

kortina• 17 years ago

I'm very disappointed to see that this is just snapshots and only runs in Windows. I would probably pay $10 / mo. for a Mac OS X suite that ran ie6, ie7, and ie8 without requiring me to use VM Ware or Parallels. The best solution I've found so far is crossbrowsertesting.com, but it's a little slow and tedious.

Andys2• 17 years ago

I think if Microsoft want me to test websites on their browsers, they should release a free or minimal cost developer's pack containing several actual versions of Windows and IE versions that I can run in Virtual Machines.

whughes• 17 years ago

They already do this (mostly): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=21e...

It's a surprisingly underappreciated option.

Andys2• 17 years ago

Wow, cool. I wonder if this will work under vmware? Will have to give it a try.

pistoriusp• 17 years ago

I'm a huge fan of IECollection (http://finalbuilds.edskes.net/iecollection.htm). It's a single ~50MB download which can install multiple versions of Internet Explorer.

I run one VirtualBox instance on my Mac which allows me to test in IE6/ 7 and 8.

View your page in multiple versions of IE side-by-side

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