Our reason for using IE 7 as a baseline comes down to our global website analytics: IE 6, 7 and 8 are the most common browsers used to access our websites. In case you’re interested, our team generally uses IE 7 as a baseline, although we do also test stable, beta and preview or dev-channel versions of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari and, of course, IE 8 to 10. I’ll explain why they might not be reliable and then I’ll present the solutions we currently use at AOL for production websites.
In this section, I’ll take you through some IE testing options that you may be using or have heard of before.
#IE EMULATOR MAC OS X TRIAL#
This has left developers in a chasm of uncertainty, forced through trial and error to discover a way to accurately test what is (for better or worse) the world’s most widely used set of browsers. In truth, I don’t think Microsoft ever considered a scenario in which developers needed a way to achieve this back when it was first conceiving IE 6, 7 and 8. As most of us know, running multiple versions of the original Internet Explorer executables on the same system is very difficult due to issues ranging from runtime version conflicts to operating-system incompatibility. Let’s begin with our old friend, Internet Explorer (IE). So, please check your website analytics first to ensure that a sufficient number of IE users visit your website in the first place to warrant this effort. Setting up accurate testing for Internet Explorer as outlined in this post requires a bit of effort. What’s The Deal With The Samsung Internet Browser?Ī quick note before we begin.Testing Mobile: Emulators, Simulators And Remote Debugging.This set-up is similar to the one used by some of my colleagues at Opera, Mozilla and Google, so, fingers crossed, we’re doing this optimally. I’m a user-interface developer at AOL (yes, we’re not dead yet!), and in this multi-part post I’ll take you through the exact set-up we use to accurately test content that will be potentially viewed by up to millions of users with a very diverse set of browsers. Issues such as runtime conflicts when running multiple versions of the same browser and inaccurate third-party testing tools mean we can spend hours just evaluating whether a testing set-up is anywhere near reliable. The reality of cross-browser testing, though, is very different.
#IE EMULATOR MAC OS X DOWNLOAD#
We would download a legacy version of a browser, run it, and be able to instantly test our pages and scripts without a single care in the world. In a perfect world, cross-browser testing would be straightforward.