[judofyr]

More important on modern.IE:

> The virtual machines testing platform is nearly finished. Once completed, you'll be able to easily test your site on Windows, Mac or Linux. Check back soon.

Having an official VirtualBox (I assume?) image would be great.

[joshstrange]

There is this https://github.com/xdissent/ievms

[estel]

These kind of already existed: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=1157...

[pdknsk]

It's VHD (although relatively easy to make work with VirtualBox), but more importantly exe files. I don't know it cabextract or unrar can handle this. In either case, it needlessly unfriendly to non-Windows users.

[xdissent]

The IE6 image is a cab and the rest are rars. I tried to make it more friendly: http://xdissent.github.com/ievms/

[raverbashing]

Then great

I won't use them (even though I remember something about cabextract being able to extract .exe files)

I won't spend a minute testing on IE except if needed.

[judofyr]

That's not an official cross-platform image. I have used some tools that converts them to VirtualBox, but it hasn't been very reliable. As I said: Having official support for Linux and Mac will be great.

[reybango]

That's the plan. :)

[pdknsk]

What's the time bomb on the images?

What I'd like is MS to make Server 2003 images, rather than XP, for IE8. And 2008, rather than 7, for IE9 and IE10.

[yuhong]

This reminds me that MS will support IE on Server 2003 until July 2015, and IE on Server 2008 (both R1 and R2) until January 2020. Yes, both R1 (based on Vista/NT 6.0) and R2 (based on Win7/NT 6.1), because R2 is considered a "minor release" while Win7 is considered a major release.

[ygra]

Since they're not activated it's 30 or 90 days, I think. But you can just revert any VM changes upon shutdown and thus extend lifetime indefinitely (makes working in some environments quite a hassle, though – e.g. I'd have to re-setup the proxy every time I start the VM).