Rendering IE7 in Mac OSX

Question

I know there is Wine IE7 for mac but its super unstable and difficult to use, is there any better way to test IE7 rendering on a mac?

EDIT: I don't want to drop several hundred bucks on parrells/windows either.

Answer 1

If you have a website, you can use the free online service of IE NetRenderer :

IE NetRendererallows you to check how a website is rendered by Internet Explorer 7, 6 or 5.5, as seen from a high speed datacenter located in Germany.

If you don't have a website, it is easy to make yourself one using the free Dynamic DNS service of DynDNS.

This method only works for the testing of static web-pages. For dynamic pages, a solution would to use VirtualBox that does support Virtual PC, so can be used with Microsoft's Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image.

From wikipedia :

Hard disks are emulated in one of three disk image formats: a VirtualBox-specific container format called "Virtual Disk Image" (VDI) which are stored as files (with a .vdi suffix) on the host operating system ; VMware Virtual Machine Disk Format (VMDK); and Microsoft Virtual PC VHD format. This means that a VirtualBox virtual machine can be set up to use disks that were created in VMware or Microsoft Virtual PC as well as its own native format. VirtualBox can also connect to iSCSI targets and to raw partitions on the host, using either as virtual hard disks. VirtualBox emulates IDE, SCSI, SATA and SAS controllers to which Hard Drives can be attached.

Answer 2

Here's a nice way to do it.

http://blog.mozmonkey.com/2008/vpc-ie6-ie7-ie8-on-mac-os-x/

The good news is that Microsoft provides free VirtualPC disk images for each of their browsers.

The bad news is that they wont run on Mac and VirtualPC wont run inside Parallels or VMWare Fusion — but I’ve found a solution! We can convert the disk images to work for VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox.

Answer 3

You can try using Browserling. The advantage compared to other, similar solutions (at least those I know of), is that the page is interactive.

Answer 4

Within Safari open the Preferences menu. Click the Advanced tab and checkmark "Show Develop Menu in menu bar". You now have the tools you'll need for a ton of checking. Also, if you use Dreamweaver you can use the checking tools in that for a text output of errors as well.