Set up the perfect OS X browser testing environment
If you’re an OS X user and a web developer, you know how difficult things can get to test your websites or scripts on Windows browsers. Some of the alternatives you might be familiar with are:
- Installing Windows XP and Parallels
- Installing Windows XP and VMWare Fusion
- Installing Darwine and IES4OSX
Each of them has its disadvantages. The first two involve purchasing software (and the OS, if you don’t have it), and the third can turn out to be slow, crash or provide a different browsing experience.
After watching the screencast by Jeff Couturier I finally achieved the cross-browser, cross-platform testing Nirvana. Here’s how
- Install an IE8 Beta Windows XP VPC with VirtualBox (IE8). Follow the instructions here. Unlike the original article, we only set up one virtual machine for all our testing needs. You can use The Unarchiver in place of 7zip.
- Install MultipleIE (IE3, IE4, IE5, IE5.5 and IE6)
- For IE7, use IE8 Tools > Compatibility View option
- Install Safari or Google Chrome (Webkit)
- Install Firefox (Gecko)
