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Test Your Web Site Using Multiple Web Browsers

So, I routinely need to test the web sites I create in both IE7 and IE6. I wouldn’t care so much about IE6 if it weren’t for the fact that some people will never be able to upgrade to IE7 without upgrading there operating system and there are a few who won’t be able to even upgrade their OS without buying a new computer. So, that leaves us with a significant number of users who are still using IE6 for the foreseeable future.

At this point, you should be developing all of your web sites for the latest and greatest browsers. Those would be IE7 and FireFox 2.0. If you aren’t, drop what you are doing and upgrade now. So, the main question remains, how do you test for IE6 once you’ve installed IE7?

Easy, you install Virtual PC, free from Microsoft. You then install Windows 2000 on a virtual PC and then perform the Windows Upgrade until you have all the required updates and IE6 installed.

Once you’ve done that you can access the host computer’s web server either by using the ip address or by using the host computer’s computer name. ie, http://localhost/appname would become http://hostname/appname

If you are running Vista or another OS with a firewall you may need to explicitly enable incoming connections on port 80/http request before this will work for you. But, it does work.

I recently had the need to access the virtual PC’s web server from my host computer and that worked too.

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