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- Matt
Internet Explorer, as much as a lot of us despise it, has a considerable market share in the browser space. Some people even still use the defunct Internet Explorer 6 (which sucks) but even Internet Explorer 8 has its own kinks and intricacies to worry about.
And up until recently it’s been hard to test a design against them if you’re using a Mac (which many designers are).
The three most popular options for testing are:
- Run a Windows partition: Obviously this isn’t ideal as it requires a reboot every time you want to see how something looks on IE. And it costs money. And you have to support an operating system you probably don’t really support, hence your computer choice.
- Use a website like Browsershots: Just as troublesome as I’ve never found one of these to work properly for me. They always seem incredibly slow (as they’re taking pictures on servers and sending them to you) and buggy. Not fun.
- Have a Windows PC: This is even worse than option 1 for obvious reasons.
However, I just recently found out about a cool little program called WineBottler, and I’m going to show you how to use it to install Internet Explorer on Mac.
- Download WineBottler
-
Install Internet Explorer
It’s located under “Install Predefined Prefixes”. Choose the version you’d like and click silent install if you’d like. -
Run it
Yeah. That’s it.
Drag both Wine and WineBottler to your Applications folder.
Can you believe how simple that was? I couldn’t. The performance isn’t perfect but it’s very simple to install, and now you can run Internet Explorer on your Mac with just a click of a button.
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
That’s a really cool trick! Just one question though; when you said to choose a version, could you only choose one? Or could you run IE6/7/8 all separately?
I never tried, but I can only imagine all separately. I’ll check it out later.
I just installed IE7 and 8 without problem. Haven’t tried to run them concurrently yet, but I can say that it is at least possible to install both.
It is really slow when you use WineBottler. I prefer to go with Parallel.
I never noticed it being too too slow. It isn’t perfect though, that’s for sure. I guess the question is if this is your only purpose for running Mac software, is the $80 for Parallels worth it?
I tried installing it a few months ago, and it never worked. Maybe I should try again. Maybe they’ve fixed it up since.
Cool! I’d love for this to work instead of having to maintain multiple VMWare instances for each different IE browser (I’m not a fan of the “consolidated” offerings that include all three IE versions in one app/install). But does anyone know if these are true, fully-functioning versions of IE? Are there limitations to what you can/can’t do?
Coincidentally I just stumbled upon this about a week ago, gave it a try and what do you know – it didn’t work. Sure Winebottler installed IE6 and IE7 without problems, but they ran so slow and crashed with the first or the second page load. I’m not quite sure if it’s because I have Leopard, or because of the unstableness of the application. Close but no cigar.
Tried it, but still not the best tool to fully test your websites I think. I work with VMWare Fusion (http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/) and that is for me the best solution. It take a while to install 3 images, for 3 (soon 4) images for every IE variant, but at the end, it’s really easy to use, runs fast, runs javascript.
I have been using virtualbox. Free virtualization software that is super reliable. I own a copy of XP, but don’t have 7 so I haven’t’ tried IE9 out. Has anyone got this running on Snow Leopard with IE9?
- IE6 won’t install
- IE8 has a broken interface and won’t connect
- IE7 kind of works but doesn’t seem to have a javascript engine
I’ll stick with Parallels and/or VirtualBox for now
Gotta love betas, I guess. ‘Cause IE6 installs for me and I use it daily. =/