E-com DevBlog Spider-ball-vacuum

2Jun/081

IETester: my new best friend for handling my worst enemy

I found a great tool out in the depths of the interweb, and I thought that I'd do a quick-ish post on it so that I can share the happiness with other people.  The tool is called IETester, and it is brilliant.  It seems to be a mdi container that is hooked into the api's of IE5.5, 6, 7, and 8 beta 1.   This allows you to crack open a tab using each rendering engine and view your websites the way they would look in that browser.

IETester with tabs open
This (above) is a screen shot of the program with the about pop up showing as well as several tabs open (all at nordictrack.com)

IETester rendering IE5.5
NordicTrack in IE 5.5 (above)

IETester rendering IE6.0
NordicTrack in IE 6 (above)

IETester rendering IE7.0
NordicTrack in IE7 (above)

IETester rendering IE8.0 beta 1
NordicTrack in IE8 (above)

As you can see from the pictures, each release of IE handled the css styling and the page layout a little bit differently.  It's almost fun to watch IE change from its quirky youth to an almost standards compliant browser (yes almost is a stretch isn't it).

BUGS:

Yeah you knew there'd be some, here's what I found, and what is posted on the developer's website.

  • I almost went into epileptic shock while using it.  Lots of screen flickering.
  • It crashed on me the first time I opened it, not sure why.
  • If you resize the screen, content may disapear.
  • Flash may not work in the IE6 rendering engine (note: it did work for me at freemotion).
  • Previous/Next buttons may not work.
  • Focus doesn't work properly.
  • Java applets esplode.
  • Javascript loading may have problems... (may be the hidden cause of the screen flickering)
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