IE Compatibility with Microsoft's Test Images
I used to test web pages for IE compatibility by walking around the office, finding a person with IE and asking them to pull up the page. I can’t do that anymore, and it doesn’t seem likely to work well if I go to the local coffee house and try it on a stranger, so I have found a new solution.
Microsoft makes VPC (virtual PC) system images available for minimal OS + IE installs for IE6, IE7, and IE8, some on both Vista and XP. Download details: IE App Compat VHD (These are timebombed and die after a few months, and look in the ReadMe.txt file for passwords.)
These can be run in VirtualBox on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris hosts. The initial boot is a little ugly as Windows gropes for drivers, but once you get the VirtualBox guest additions installed it is smooth.
On my 12+ month old iMac booting an XP machine with IE takes about 22 seconds (10 seconds in BIOS, 10 booting XP, 2 logging in), restarting one from saved state takes about 6 seconds. Once running they are snappy. They don’t feel any different from native applications.
You can find excellent instructions for running these under VirtualBox at zytzagoo’s den. These are written for linux users. I used linux for the unrar step but used my Mac for the VirtualBox machine.
If you want to test with more than one version of IE you will discover that Microsoft used the same UUID for all of the disk images (challenging the meaning of unique) and that VirtualBox is offended by that. You can read the also good instructions at Shape Shed and look at the Fixing Microsoft’s Duplicate Identifiers section for details on converting the image to a raw image and back to a VDI to get a new UUID.