Testing your site on IEs

Yes, it is IEs or Internet Explorers.

The trend of tableless site design is significantly growing. The idea behind this concept is you’ll use CSS to determine the width and height of our pseudo-“tables”. However, it is not a secret that CSS is not consistent across browsers and it depresses developers (and site designers as well) that a site does not appear the way it should be.

If you are currently using IE7, chances are, your site might not behave correctly on IE6 (or for any browser for that matter). There are circulating information over the internet how to tweak using IE6 and IE7 side by side in a single machine. Some of these include various changes in the registry and other miscellaneous stuff. Since we started deploying our site (PEP), we understand that majority of our target audience uses IE as their primary browser and there will be differences from our development machine as we are using Firefox being more “standards” compliant than IE.

So as not to compromise the site design (knowing the fact that site content is secondary to aesthetics), we installed this 10.6 mb file download that enables us to install multiple versions of IE (even up to IE 3.0). Just imagine you have IE versions from 3.0 to 7.0. It’s not that we’re keeping this program as “secret” but I still find some people asking for ways on how to test their site on IE6 when IE7 is installed in their machines. So I guess, if you are more concerned on how your site will look on different browsers, this program is a good shot!

Of course, the program is not perfect; the older browsers doesn’t load sites from the internet but load sites from your local IIS/Apache webservers. As far as we our concerned, the only issue that we found by using this program is that the we cannot retrieve fully the cookie information that we have set by loading the site.

If you want to check this, download the program from Tredosoft.

Happy coding!