nice, let's hope this one's better than Multiple IE's, which is a great but it does give me some issues with the browsers open.

CaptainSquishy

Love to see something like this for mac, since that's where I do my development.

dwroth

wow, this would be a great Firefox Extension idea. To have it render in all the different web browsers, without needing them at all. And like dwroth said, Mac version is a must

Pepper

What about IE Tab for Firefox [addons.mozilla.org]

Woodsyx

Looks good, although they have a bit of work to do (v0.2.2). I think their site could use a favicon, too. xD

Descent

Nice. This will come in handy.

cbiggins

Wow I hope this works!

jerlatham

Great tool! Looks much better than the MultipleIEs I currently use. I agree with dwroth, we definitely need a good IE testing environment on the Mac.

rebolyte

I've been using this for a month now. Slow on Vista but it does the job.

@Woodsyx:
IE Tab for firefox only renders the version of IE currently installed on your system.

pierre

@Nice! What I would love to see though is firebug for IE.

nikrox

Maybe if we all made IE5/6 sheets that destroy the site it would encourage the masses to upgrade! Stop that support! IE5 is just too naughty!

!--[if IE 5]
SCRIPT LANGUAGE="Javascript"
alert("Tip: For the love of God, please consider upgrading your browser");
/SCRIPT
![endif]--

zarathustra

this is lot better than Multiple IE...

andhapp

@Pepper: There is a firefox extension that does just that - it's called User Agent Switcher: [addons.mozilla.org]

I think I'll wait till IETester is in full release before giving up my Multiple IEs.

saffyre9

I use it frequently at work. It's a little slow and can be a pain navigating through large sites, but a solid tool nonetheless. It's just pathetic that we need such a program. If browser devolopers would simply stick to the W3C (IE, I'm looking squarely in your direction) we wouldn't have to check compatibilty on a half dozen browsers.

@zarathustra: Brilliant idea.

getjustin

saffyre9, Does user agent switcher alter the way a page renders, or does it just spoof the browser signature sent to the server?

dwroth

Internet Explorer is the greatest internet browser ever designed. It single-handedly allowed the internet to expand into the glorious universe it is today.

Other browsers like firef*ck should get down on its knees and strive to be more like IE. EVERY browser should be more like IE.

All this talk about standards is from a bunch of godless, America-hating communists who fail to understand that IE always has been and always will be THE STANDARD.

God Bless America, Microsoft, and the right to bear arms!

rfjason

Suggestion: use browsershots.org instead.

Cross-platform (web-based), renders your site in any of a few dozen browsers/OSes

Granted, your site needs to be internet accessible, but it's easy enough to put your draft up on separate hosting for 10 minutes to run the test.

vollmond

it is unfortunate that this was broadcasted before the kinks were worked out.. now i'm just disappointed with what it can't do =(

ssstonebraker

rfjason: Cute comment. It was almost funny :)

Given that you are trolling and you probably haven't ever programmed (although you likely think that you are god's gift to programmers), I will break this down for you. A web designers life goes something like this:

Once you have built a complicated site that looks perfect in Firefox, Safari, Opera, you open up a version of IE (say 8) and flip out at the differences between what you designed and what IE chose to display. Then you spend ages making tweaks to get it to look the same in IE 8 as the standards compliant browsers (like Firefox, Safari, Opera, and most browsers other than IE). Then you open IE 7 and repeat the process. Then you open IE 6 and repeat the process again. Then you strangle anyone who even hints at making the site run on IE browsers earlier than IE 6.

By the end of that, it takes every ounce of energy that you have to not use that "right to bear arms" against the people at Microsoft :)

DrM

For the benefit of those who don't code web pages,
this chart sums up the problem nicely.

Robert J. Walker

DrM: such a true description of the work. I'm always tempted to log client hours that I spend dealing with MSIE as "Microsoft Tax" but I doubt any clients would find that funny.

martin_kelley

@nikrox: Have you checked out the IE Developer Toolbar? [www.microsoft.com]
It's no where near as good as Firebug, but it has the basic features.

eelmonger

@dwroth: User agent switcher just spoofs the browser signature sent to the server. The authors site states "Switching the user agent does not make the browser render a page like another browser"

[chrispederick.com]

RustyIdiot

This seems like something that would really benefit mac users, it's a shame it's Windows only. I long for the day that someone makes a browser clone of IE7 that runs natively in OS X

greenanji

You could also use [crossbrowsertesting.com]

tonetheman

I greatly welcome anything that can ease the pain of developing for internet explorer. I also understand that this is an alpha version. That said, there is a lot of room for improvement. The interface is totally different than that of ie for no particular reason. This video is painful to watch http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/Doc. Watch how many times he has to select and reselect the address bar to be able to type something in. This is one thing I always hated about ie and IeTester is 10x as bad about it. The logical "Switch to ie6/7/8" does not exist in a tab context menu, nor in any menu for that matter. You have to open a new tab. The side-by-side comparison is nice and all, but I'd never really use it. For now, I'm sticking to multiple ies for testing in ie6 and ie8beta (which has an ie7 emulation mode). I'm getting very close to phasing out ie6 in my development scheme for non-critical errors anyways. Not so much because ie6 usage is going down (because it's not for a while), but because I'm tired of being hindered by .pngs, multiple css class bugs, lack of css selectors (like attribute selectors), blah, blah, blah. Let's can it already.

ZahidPelops