IETester: Testing on IE5.5 through IE8 made easy

If you have ever developed a website, you’ll know that one of the golden rules is “test on as many browsers as possible”. This doesn’t just mean testing on IE, Firefox, Opera and the funny looking Apple one. It means testing on different versions of those browsers on different operating systems. Testing against multiple versions of Firefox and Opera is easy: just install multiple versions. IE is a whole different story though. Because IE integrates so deeply into the operating system, it isn’t possible (without severe amounts of effort) to run multiple copies of IE at once on the one machine, until IETester came along. In their own words:

IETester is a free WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 1, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process

I’ve installed it and it seems to work well on my Vista box, despite it being an alpha release. As an added bonus for the future, the developers would like to get it working on Linux using Wine and Macs using Parallels. Offers of assistance in these areas will be gratefully received.

I tried out this website on IE5.5 by the way. It looks a mess and fails to render correctly. Oops!

(Click on image to see full-size version)