I'd be very interested to hear what professional developers think about this, particularly frontend developers.
How do you go about testing your designs in multiple browsers? Do you use virtual machines, each with a different version of Internet Explorer installed? What is your setup/workflow?
So, what's the most efficient and reliable way to test a design in several legacy web browsers?
Thank you.
I mostly use Spoon virtualization. They removed IE from the service aftyer Microsoft told them to however it's still a good service for testing other browsers/versions.
For IE I tend to use the Microsoft provided IE VMs.
If you need virtualization product then VirtualBox is pretty good and free.
I've also just discovered Browserling which does something similar to Spoon virtualization and has support for multiple IE versions.
Oracle's VirtualBox is free. I have the following VMs set-up:
Really, I don't test older versions of Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. All three of those browsers are on quick update cycles now and the push their updates almost immediately. The chance that users are still using an older version of those is much less than those using Internet Explorer.
Even now, I don't really test in IE6 anymore (thank god), but I know this is different depending on the audience of your website.
Really, if you can get away with it, do your basic testing in IE 7, 8, 9 and the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Don't go completely out of your way to fix layout issues in older IEs; If you can get the information you want from the site, then the site is functioning. If someone complains about the site not looking exactly right, recommend they upgrade or switch browsers. "I can't upgrade from IE6 because my company uses it" is not really a valid excuse anymore with Chrome and Firefox being as light weight as they are, unless their computer admins have things completely locked down.
IE Tester allows to see web from ie5 till ie9.
http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage
It depends how legacy you wonna go but there is also Adobe browser lab.
