[LRUG] Best way to use Windows IE on Snow Leopard?

[Tom Morris]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 13:21, Andrew Stewart <boss at airbladesoftware.com> wrote:
> I've finally upgraded my OS X to Snow Leopard and this has broken my Parallels installation.  I used it to test my webapps in Internet Exploder.
>
> What's the best way to run IE on Snow Leopard?  Parallels / VMWare / VirtualBox / something else?
>

I'm using XP in VirtualBox. VMware and Parallels are nicer, but
VirtualBox is free and cross-platform (so when Apple finally decide to
abolish the Mac and force us all to use iPads, I have an escape route
to Linux-land).

On Windows, you might want to avail yourself of MultipleIE:
http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE
This lets you install multiple versions of IE going back as far as IE3.

There is also ie4osx which uses X11 and Wine to install IE6. Instructions here:
http://macapper.com/2007/11/29/ies4osx-run-internet-explorer-567-natively-in-os-x/

It is a pretty good way of doing it, although it doesn't anti-alias
fonts and the JavaScript runs quite sluggishly. It also flickers a
lot. So it can't be relied on as a way to pixel-perfect test IE
rendering, but is still useful for a lot of testing stuff like
JavaScript with a lower overhead than running an XP VM.


One other useful thing to know: if you are using VirtualBox (or VMware
or Parallels), you often want to move the disk images around between
machines - and keep them synced. But you don't want to move these
large files around - just the changes.

Well, then look at bup - http://github.com/apenwarr/bup

bup uses the git packfile format on your VM volumes to sync between
machines and do incremental backups.

-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>