If this is true, our miserable lives as developers, might soon become just a little bit less miserable.
The infamous IEblog reports that its developer team has found a way to bypass the Microsoft marketing departement and make the new version of Internet Explorer – IE 8, pronounced: IE HATE – more standard compliant. They have kindly requested general manager Dean Hachamovitch to leave his million dollar villa and for once actually do some work and put up an image of Internet Explorer 8 passing the Acid2 test. Lets just hope that Hachamovitch did not photoshop the image on his MacBook Pro.
Developers around the world, aware of the fact that this solves none of their problems, but hoping for a better day, are now waiting for the IE team to come up with an innovative solution to clear the dominance of IE version 6 in user world.
After the launch of Internet Explorer 7 in October 2006, the browsers developer team at Microsoft have once again excelled in productivity. After 14 months of hard labor they have astonished the world by coming up with a revolutionairy new name for the next release of the most hated piece of software in the world . Yes, the next horrible piece of crap that will roll out of their stinky ovens will carry the magnificent name of… Internet Explorer 8.
Already web developers around the world are referring to the upcoming terror as Internet Explorer HATE. Check out the comments on the obviously-designed-by-a-programmer IE blog. Seems like the Redmond crew is not making a lot of friends in developer land.
Parallels and VMWare have always been pretty good ways to get the job done. The bad thing about them though is that you have to install and boot an entire OS for just 1 application.
A much better solution is ie4osx. This is a very very nifty solution by Mike Kronenberg that allows you to run multiple versions of IE as standalones on an intel based mac using Darwine. A couple of huge benefits of ie4osx over the usual emulators:
- Less memory usage – Since you don’t have to run an entire OS, you need a lot less resources.
- Faster workflow – Obviously instead of having to boot an entire OS and make several commands within your emulator, it’s a lot more fun to just startup IE like any other application.
- Conditional Comments work like a charm – This is nothing Parallels or VMWare can help, but more a problem on Windows itself. You can run multiple versions of IE, but testing Conditional Comments is difficult. All versions will identify themselves as the highest version installed. Since Conditional Comments are usually one of the main reasons you are testing anyways, this is a very good thing.
- Easier to test through a local webserver - Since it runs locally on OS X, IE will use whatever hostname configuration you’ve setup on OS X. This means that if you use the webserver capabilities on OS X as a local development environment, you can access your websites through the hostnames you use in your other browsers. This can’t be done as easily on Parallels or VMWare.
Don’t expect it to work as snappy as your other OS X apps, but if you’re a developer that wants to fit IE testing smoothly into his workflow, ie4osx is exactly what you need.
Note: this is for OSX 10.4 Tiger, if you are on Leopard: tutorial for installing GD support on 10.5 Leopard.
I’m sure the people at Apple had a good reason not to include the GD library in the default apache/PHP installation that comes with OS X. Too bad though, because sooner or later you’ll need it when using OS X as a web development platform. Getting it running is not much like the 1.2.3 installing procedures you are used to on a mac, but here’s how to do it. — Read on
