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by omgmog 5157 days ago
It's not a lot of work to get a Windows/IE virtual environment up and running on a Mac, I use Virtualbox daily in combination with https://github.com/xdissent/ievms

This shell script automatically downloads Windows virtual machine images from Microsoft, so that testing can be done in IE6/7/8/9. You don't even need to use separate machines, if you get a Windows 7 virtual machine set up you can use IE Tester to run IE5.5-9 http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage
1 comments
doc4t 5157 days ago
It's actually much more work to test on a Mac when developing on a Windows machine since Apple is so protective of OS X that they don't allow it to run in a vm.

Which is sad because I like to have all kinds of users but it's really really difficult to accommodate for all you guys browsing on a mac.

Please hit me with hints to make life easier for myself if you have some...

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chao- 5157 days ago
Agreed. Not a single person in my company (a whole five people) owns a Mac, and it leaves us with no real options on the compatibility front. I prefer to develop in Linux, but I have a Windows partition since it's easy enough to do. But none of us have the pocket change lying around to buy a redundant machine just to check up on some demonstrably minimal segment of our users who use Safari on OS X.

I'll put in the time to boot into a Windows partition and double-check IE9, but when it comes to OS X/Safari, I've got little recourse but to crossing my fingers and bank on Safari's Webkit rendering being the same as (or close enough to) Chrome in Windows and Chromium in Linux.

Safari DOES have a Windows version, but I've never seen it enter into the conversation at all. Is it guaranteed to have true rendering/display parity with the OS X variant?

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doc4t 5157 days ago
"Is it guaranteed to have true rendering/display parity with the OS X variant?" No. Last time I made a hackintosh running Safari on Win and Mac sometimes produced different outcomes in certain scenarios. Things might have changed though.
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zbuc 5157 days ago
> I'll put in the time to boot into a Windows partition and double-check IE9, but when it comes to OS X/Safari, I've got little recourse but to crossing my fingers and bank on Safari's Webkit rendering being the same as (or close enough to) Chrome in Windows and Chromium in Linux.

Might want to try the Windows version of Safari then. The JS engines in Chrome and Safari have some quirks between them and can behave differently in some scenarios, mostly things that JSLint would catch though.

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omgmog 5157 days ago
If you can stomach it, there's Safari for Windows, Google Chrome should render the same across platforms, as should Firefox.

The only thing you'd need a Mac for really is ensuring that your colors/contrast look good, and that fonts are readable (on account of the font hinting).

The other option, of course, is to either buy a Mac, or build a Hackintosh.

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stutter 5157 days ago
Macs run Windows, Windows don't run OSX. This is why I develop on Mac; it's more versatile. (For web development)
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untog 5157 days ago
Well, that's one way of phrasing it.

Microsoft allows you to run Windows in a virtual machine, Apple bans you from doing so. That's why I develop on a Mac; Apple forces me to.

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codesuela 5157 days ago
but at least there is Safari for Windows
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