Tim Almond

I’m personally a Firefox and Opera fan, but the majority of the world is Internet Explorer.

When you install Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), you lose Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). You can’t have both installed. And when IE8 comes along, you won’t be able to run it alongside IE7.

For the vast majority of the world, this isn’t a problem, but if you’re a web developer it is. Because when you deliver a site, you should be testing it against a number of browsers to make sure it looks and works OK, and due to the large install base of both IE6 and IE7, that includes testing both.

So, to solve the problem, you either go doing lots of installing and uninstalling, running multiple PCs, or running in a virtual machine to test IE6. Worst of all, IE8 isn’t going to solve this. Developers will have to do the same thing as IE7 and IE8 grow.

Thankfully, someone is working on a solution called DebugBar which is a desktop app where sites can be browsed and browsed in different versions. So you can see IE5.5, IE6, IE7 and IE8. It’s still in alpha, but well worth a look.

Tags: Software Development //