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Reflective Surface

Still powered by a contradiction in terms

Multiple IE versions

November 6, 2003 at 7:56 pm · Filed under Web

Via mezzoblue comes one of the best finds in the field of Web development in the past few months: it’s possible to run instances of different Internet Explorer versions on a single machine, contrary to what was previously believed.

The way to do it is awkward and something of a kludge, but it works and solves a big problem when testing sites. For example, according to this site’s statistics, most IE visitors coming here are using version 5.5, but a lot of others are using 5.0 and 6.0, which means that whenever I change something I have to test the site in all those versions. However, I have only one machine, which runs IE 6.0. Now I can easily test any changes in all those versions using only my own machine. It’s a hack, but a very nice hack indeed.

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MiekyC said,

November 11, 2003 @ 3:55 am

“visitors coming here are using version 5.5, but a lot of others are using 5.0 and 6.0″

There are padding “quirks” that exist in IE5.5 that don’t exist in IE5 or IE6. Kind of surprising as, up until now, I’ve been able to test in IE5 and IE6 and just assumed that I had all my bases covered.

Even though I don’t really test against pre-IE5, I just couldn’t resist getting IE4 and IE3 ;)

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Ronaldo said,

November 11, 2003 @ 10:44 pm

IE 5 is a very different beast than its successors. One of the things that bugs me the most about those versions is the fact that FRAME and IFRAME implementation and handling changed from 5 to 5.5. I still make mistakes when programming in both because of those differences.

As for testing on IE4, some of the sites I maintained in my previous job where required to work on it. Thanks God I’m not there anymore… :-)

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