[stutter]

> Which they do, they've been offering complete VM images with various combinations of Windows and IE for some time, the current offering is XP + IE6, Vista + IE7, Win7 + IE8 and Win7 + IE9

I've used the IEVMs project on github to install these VMs before; it failed. I'm trying it again as we speak, maybe it's a viable solution, maybe not.

> IE9's devtools are significantly better than IE8's: more feature and much more stability. They are nowhere near WDT/Firebug yet (or even Dragonfly), but they are a huge improvement over the POS that IE8's devtools are.

Obviously the problem here is that IE9 represents 25% of the currently in-use IE browsers and has (to quote rey bango, http://blog.reybango.com/2012/05/08/hey-paydirt-your-site-wo...) 35% world-wide Win7 marketshare, which as I saw somewhere (maybe arstechnica) only has 50% marketshare. So you're looking at ~17.5% give or take for other versions of windows running IE9, call it a conservative 25% adoption for all IEs across the web.

TL:DR; IE9 has a ways to go before it's new amazing developer tools are valued significantly. Until then, we're still stuck with IE6-8 ):

You make valid points; and the VMs available on their site should help testing availability. It's too bad that the debugging is still second-class and torture ):

[jasonlotito]

> I've used the IEVMs project on github to install these VMs before; it failed. I'm trying it again as we speak, maybe it's a viable solution, maybe not.

The official ones work. I'm actually installing the IE7 version as we speak, IE8 and IE9 are running fine in VirtualBox.

[masklinn]

> I've used the IEVMs project on github to install these VMs before

I don't know about that, downloaded them straight from Microsoft's website.

> Obviously the problem here is that IE9 represents 25% of the currently in-use IE browsers

Note that IE9 can be switched to IE8's engine (there are differences with the official IE8 but not that much, so most of the rough work can be done with IE9's devtools even using the IE8 engine).

> IE9 has a ways to go before it's new amazing developer tools are valued significantly.

I did not say IE9's devtools were "amazing", because they are not (unless your only comparison basis is IE6 devtools or pre-firebug Firefox devtools that is). But they are significantly better than IE8's (let alone 6/7)