Test website in Internet Explorer using Mac [duplicate]

This question already has answers here: Is there a IE tester for mac? [closed] (7 answers) 开发者_开发技巧 Closed 10 years ago.

I'm a webmaster that use mac platform to develop. Can someone suggest me the best way to test my website with IExplorer using a Mac? There're some virtualizer such as parallel, crossover, wine and so on, can someone suggest me the best for this purpose? Or some other workaround is appreciated (i really don't need an entire copy of windows, only to test my websites on IE6 and IE7 using my mac)

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First: Look at the question linked to in the comments. If you just need to see what a site looks like, browsershots.org will do the trick. But if you need to fully test and debug, you need Windows. But that can be done too:

1. Purchase Parallels Desktop

2. Download free Windows virtual machines directly from Microsoft made specifically for this purpose. You can rename the .exe self-extracting archives .rar instead, and unpack with anything that can extract RAR files

3. Import the resulting virtual machine image into Parallels, and you're done

Just know that many of the Windows images are huge. You'll need something like 40GB free to download, unpack and convert the Windows Vista and Windows 7 images (once you're done, you can of course toss a bunch of stuff out again)

Edit: Oh, yeah, forgot to mention: The Windows images last about 3 months at a time before they lock down completely, and you have to download a fresh copy. Microsoft obviously isn't giving away fully-fledged Windows copies for free :)

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One option is to join MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network subscription) to get access to all Windows versions in all languages etc. You can install those you need in separate Parallels virtual machines (VMWare and virtualbox would work as well).

This allows you to install the exact version some customer happens to have, e.g. certain old Windows Server with certain IE version, etc to replicate the environment for testing and regression testing.

I would say that virtual machine installations are a must so you get the exact complete real thing.

MSDN has different options, "OS only" would be probably enough for this need (I had other needs for Windows development tools as well so got the full MSDN). MSDN has a cost (on the order of $1k/year) but was worth it to get access to everything for development and testing purposes.

PS. The only fun thing was that as a Mac-based UNIX developer I had many versions of Windows and many versions of Linux installed on my MacBook, but only one installation of OSX ;-) Some people also thought it was fun to see a "Mac developer" with "MSDN subscription", but whatever gets the work done, is the way to go.