Posted by Screenack on April 12, 2011 at 3:58pm
If there's any lemonade to be made out of IE, it's that IE8 let's you do testing in IE7 and IE8.
Does installing IE9 remove that kind of configuration ability?
One doesn't blithely install new programs on Windows, (including MS programs; hello registry!) so I'm curious to hear from any pioneers.
Thanks!
Comments
IE9 DOES support IE7 - 8 emulation
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/06/16/ie-s-compatibility-feature...
I'm impressed.
IMHO - Virtual machines with different IE versions is best
FWIW - At my work, we deal with a lot of Fortune 500 type firms... and unfortunately, a fair number of them (especially in the financial sector) have "locked down" corporate PC images that include older browsers. So as much as we would like to say "sorry, you need a new browser version", we can't. All we can say is "Tested to work with ... and we will do a best effort attempt to work with older browsers".
We've tried various ways to test IE version compatibly with emulations, etc. But ultimately we have ended up with have a set of Virtual Machine Windows installs with IE 6.5 (yuck! but some folks are locked into this), IE 7.0, and IE 8.0 on a common test machine that people can Remote Desktop into for troubleshooting.
We try to develop to IE 7.0 but since we've moved to Win 7.0, our dev boxes are using IE 8.0. Fortunately, we haven't seen a lot of issues between 7 and 8... as long as you keep your DOCTYPE statements correct at the top (we tend to use 4.01 transitional). But occasionally we need to test against an older version if a client requests it or we get an problem report with people using an older browser.
We got some folks drooling over the HTML 5.0 things that are coming out... but unfortunately the folks that pay the bills aren't moving to browsers that support this rapidly.... sigh
Exactly right
Well, the good news is that IE6 is finally on its way out and MS, to it's credit is finally pushing the matter: http://ie6countdown.com/
I usually find that I can get a customer to drop supporting IE6 on two fronts: 1) the cost of designing and QA to support a browser that's below 7% in their geographical targets and 2) people that run IE6 don't sign the kind of checks you're looking for. If you toss a Fortune 500 "scrap" my way, I of course would happily incorporate that business requirement. ;) That said, I have yet to do a design that disregards IE6. The presentation is acceptable, (no overlapping objects, or objects clearly out of position) but not as good as in the supported browsers.
I used to QA with multiple VMs, but, jeesh, what a massive footprint, unless you've got a more svelte option? There's also IETester which is convenient, if buggy. (It really is intolerant of javascript errors in IE7)
I've wondered about all the html 5 talk myself, at least for b-2-c sites; at least for site deployment. Obviously the presumption isn't for general b-2-c requirements.
Totally Agree .. 6.x (and may 7.0) should be off the table..
I totally agree with talking b-2-c folks out of 6.x... and maybe into doing minimum 7.0 compat testing.
I should have pointed out that our sites tend to be for "client" consumption only (support for client specific educational programs). So, our 6.x % of users can be high if that is what the client is using. In fact, we were laughing here that we probably know which company in the UK accounts for 1 or 2% of the UK's 3.5% of IE 6 your chart show.
As to svelte options...with Windows 7 Ultimate /Professional you can download a virtual XP SP3 "machine" from MS. This eliminates the installing a system from the ground up. There are ways to "clone" this to have different configurations. It also helps to have a box that you can keep the VMs up and running all the time... but you can keep them on you dev machines to start as needed. But this still requires disk space and a machine that can run it.
See: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/
Excellent
OK, so I don't need 3 full Win OS VMs, but merely an emulation layer to run IE6. THAT is very helpful, thanks!