Now able to test IE6, IE 7 and IE8 in XP and Vista

Being on Vista since launch date ( coming up to a year a and half believe it or not !) we have had to revert to older PCs to check what web sites look and perform on with IE 6 and 7.

With IE6 still having a prominent (and unfortunate) foothold of up to 40% on some of our sites, its absolutely vital the site is fully tested and rendered in this browser. Its sometimes possible to get away with one stylesheet that covers all the browsers, well i say all, but Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE6 and IE7*. Internet Explorer 7 renders far better than 6 but still suffers from little blemishes here and there. It is sometimes necessary to use conditional stylesheets when the lovely guys at Microsoft’s software just wont step into line, despite contengincy measures.

A little off topic with the conditionals but the point is that IE6 needs to be tested in. It wasnt possible till now on Vista, but the fantastic guys at DebugBar have come up with an app that you can test any version of IE in Vista and XP.

The software is still in Alpha but this is looking very promising indeed. Its about time for something be available. However it really should be Microsoft that had something developed, web designers are the ones that spend millions of hours getting CSS to play nice because their own software isn’t up to scratch.

* These are the main web browsers but sometimes IE5 other minority share web browsers need to tested in. It all depends, as with most things in web design, with the target audience.

P.S : If you relatively new to to the web design scene you are very lucky indeed IE’s market share has almost disappeared.  Think coding difficulty for IE6 multiplied by 3.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 6th, 2008 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.