[rickmb]

I tried to encourage my team to test better against IE by creating a nice setup on which they could easily use all relevant IE versions.

After two days of struggling with all the insanity of Windows licensing, installing and the crap support for running older / multiple versions of IE I've seen more than enough of Microsoft for the next five years.

Nothing has changed since 2000. Just setting up the tools for supporting IE is nightmare.

[perssontm]

Just get an account at www.crossbrowsertesting.com . I did around 2 years back I think, and its really convenient. you vnc to whatever os/browser combo you like and test it out. They have a demo for local testing as well, but I've always used a reverse ssh tunnel for that.

Note, Im not affiliated with crossbrowsertesting.com in any way.

[iandanforth]

I have also enjoyed the Scout service from Saucelabs. It is a fully in-browser experience. They do all the VM work and stream you the screen.

Full Disclosure: I am friends with one of the founders and was in a promotional video for saucelabs.

[axefrog]

What I have trouble with is why that's valid when on the reverse side of the coin, one must literally buy Apple hardware to test in an Apple environment.

[rbanffy]

> one must literally buy Apple hardware to test in an Apple environment.

You have to consider the total cost. If the Apple hardware lasts longer, requires less maintenance and makes the developers more productive, it may end up very well paying for itself. My wife uses a Mac and just the time I didn't spend fixing, cleaning and disinfecting a Windows install more than paid for the price difference between her MBP and a cheap Dell. Compare it against a similarly well built machine and things look even worse for the PC. Her current Mac (a 13" i7 MBP) survived a car crash in early March (the machined body is very slightly warped and it'll probably have to make a visit to an Apple dealer for that). Her previous one, a 2006 white MB, sits on my desk as my secondary computer and is our main source of ambient music. It had an aesthetic problem, which was fixed by Apple for free (because other parts had to be replaced due to a recall) last March. It replaced a (still working flawlessly) 1998 iMac in that function. You can say anything about those machines except that they aren't built to last and that their customer service isn't stellar.

If I had to use my Dell with Windows, I know I would be far less productive than I am under Linux. I know because I tried (from 2008 to 2010).

Unless you are developing for Windows (something that pretty much implies you are running Visual Studio), I wouldn't advise you to use Windows as your development platform. And, if you aren't, it's only natural that testing on Windows incurs an extra cost.

Having said that, it shouldn't be that complicated to set up Windows VMs to run automated Selenium-driven tests and plug those into Jenkins.

If you test manually, you are doing it wrong.

[calloc]

Safari is available for Windows. If developers were running Windows they could test IE, Chrome, FireFox and Safari all at once.

[rickmb]

The thing is, buying Apple hardware immediately solves my problem for a long time. I may only have to upgrade the OS (cheaply and painlessly) from time to time.

If MS could offer the same, no problem. Those two days of struggling and the repeat performances to come are way, way more expensive than buying a Mac. My time and the time of my devs is way more valuable than a Mac Mini.

[Draiken]

You obviously never had to work on a huge project that has to support IE browsers.

My company has to do that and we spend countless hours on IE specific tasks.

It works on IE10? great! I don't know if it will on IE11. Or if microsoft will find another way to break open standarts.

If we had a choice of not supporting IE, we'd do it. Not because of Mac, not because of Linux. Because of IE and nothing else.

[jasonlotito]

It's not really difficult at all to test.

MS provides the virtual machines free of charge, and VirtualBox is free as well. That's everything you need to run and test in IE, from IE6 to IE9 right now.

[devth]

If you want to test multiple versions of IE, you need to do some time intensive VM cloning to trick VirtualBox into thinking they're actually separate images. Then configure and install IE's debugger tools for each image. Then, when the VMs expire in a few months repeat that process.

Add to that the problem of VMs booting slow, running slow, and consuming tons of memory on my otherwise-fast dev machine.

[jasonlotito]

> If you want to test multiple versions of IE, you need to do some time intensive VM cloning to trick VirtualBox into thinking they're actually separate images.

No, you don't. You just run different images. Downloaded from MS. I have them installed. Right now. IE7, IE8, IE9. IE9 is currently running. Even still, for the most part, IE9 makes debugging easy, as you can run in IE7 and IE8 mode. That takes care of the rest of the problems I've faced.

Yes, testing in IE sucks. It's not an enjoyable experience, but it also doesn't take much effort.

> Then configure and install IE's debugger tools for each image.

This is not an issue. You make this sound like it takes a lot of work. It's not.

> Add to that the problem of VMs booting slow, running slow, and consuming tons of memory on my otherwise-fast dev machine.

I'm running this on a MacBook Air. Yes, they aren't lightning fast, but they are usable for debugging purposes.

> Then, when the VMs expire in a few months repeat that process.

That's not true, either. I've been using my IE7 one, for example, since October.

[base698]

I used to have a beast of a machine with a VM for IE6 - 9. It was super easy to test all of them simultaneously.

In modern times however, I think when we try to support IE it will be 9 and higher. It's not that it's too much work, rather that IE 8 and lower users are hurting the internet.

[akmiller]

Try BrowserStack, it's awesome. I am not affiliated with them in any way, but we have to support several different configurations for our web application and it's pretty impressive. Much better than having several virtual machines locally which I used to do!