Testing in IE 5, 5.5, 6, and 7 on a Single Machine

I’ve always found it a pain to test in the various versions of Internet Explorer. In Windows, there’s no easy way to install multiple versions, so whether you are working on a physical Windows machine, or a virtual machine via Parallels, VMware or some other virtualization software, proper testing in IE always required at least two or three separate machines.

The other day a co-worker showed me a cool little setup that will allow you to test in IE5, 5.5, 6, and 7 on the same physical Windows XP machine. I suppose this would also work on a virtualized copy of Windows XP on a Mac, but since this solution involves virtualization, you’d be running a virtual machine inside of another virtual machine, which means you’d need a heck of a powerful system.

Assuming you are running Windows XP, you should already have a copy of IE7 installed. One IE down, 3 more to go. So, here’s how to get the rest of them:

Download VirtualBox and follow the installation instructions.
Grab the .iso for your choice of Linux distro (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Suse, Mandriva, or PCLinuxOS should work at the time of this writing) . I used Ubuntu in my setup.
Launch VirtualBox and setup a new virtual machine for your Linux distro.
Start the virtual machine and follow the prompts in the First Run wizard, making sure to set your media source to the Linux .iso you just downloaded.
Click Finish at the end of the wizard and your Linux distro should start the installation process (this process will vary depending on your distro of choice).
Visit the IEs4Linux website and follow the instructions to install cabextract, Wine and IEs4Linux.
Once you’re done with the install, you should have icons on your Linux desktop for each of the IEs that you installed. Just double-click and point them at the URL you want to test!