That Norwegian Guy

I’ve been testing in “multiple IEs”:http://thatnorwegianguy.com/how-to-install-multiple-versions-of-ie/ for a while, but recently I ran into a huge problem. Huge to me because I rely on conditional comments rather than CSS hacks/filters. As it turns out multiple IE doesn’t read conditional comments, probably because Windows and/or the Internet Explorers get confused about which browser itself is. I know, how hard can it be? Specially when other browsers have no problems emulating any browser you want it to be.

h3. The new solution

“DebugBar”:http://www.my-debugbar.com/ launched “IEtester”:http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage last -week- month, enabling us to have *one* browser, one interface, with tabs that renders four flavors of IE. That’s versions 5.5, 6, 7 and beta 8 for the time being.

Using “conditional comments”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_comments I’ve targeted the various browsers with a simple test. As you can see, IEtester even lets you open the various versions in tabs within the same window. A very nice touch.

!http://img.skitch.com/20080630-mynb2i9a4widmw4swms5gmh128.jpg(HTML test rendering in IEtester)!

The html looks something like this:
(Because of textile and pre not playing well together the dashes “–” have an extra spacing that shouldn’t be there.)

<!- - [if IE 5.5]>
 <div class="fivefive" >
  <p>
    You are using <abbr title="Internet Explorer">IE</abbr>
    older than 6.
  </p>
 </div>
<![endif]- ->

Viewing the same page in the default IE6, where it believes to be the newest IE installed on the system. This obviously will lead to some headslapping, at least in my case.

!http://img.skitch.com/20080630-8rimdedq27funabgdr2adhbuyy.jpg(HTML test rendering in IE6)!

So there you go. You can “view the test page here”:http://thatnorwegianguy.com/playtime/IEtester.html. If you are serious about making websites that work get hold of this little gem. However, still being in alpha, there are some *bugs*. One particular that I’ve come across is that if you open IE6 as the first tab IEtester will crash. Open IE6 secondly or later and there’s no problem.

All my testing has been done on a Mac running XP sp2 on Parallels.

Tags:   debugging · IE · IEtester · testing1 Comment